Comparison of sand patch test and multi laser profiler in pavement surface measurement

Abstract

Pavement surface texture has been assessed with variety of test methods such as sand patch test and multi laser profiler. In recent years, road administrations face the issues of handling data acquired by totally different methods and the inconsistent correlation between different methods. Therefore, the objective of this study is to determine and compare the texture depth value of road pavement measured by different methods namely sand patch test and multi laser profiler. This paper compares the results of two measurement methods for pavement surface macro texture which referred as mean texture depth (MTD). Tests were conducted along North-South Expressway, between km 110.5 and km 107.2 (Southbound). T-test analysis shows that there is statistically significance difference on the result obtained between these methods along emergency lane. However for slow lanes, it was found that there is no significance between sand patch test and laser based measurement. Regression analysis shows that the coefficient of correlation, R obtained from emergency lane is 0.3719 and slow lane is 0.4579. These results generally conclude that there were weak correlations between the result of these two measurement techniques