Structural Health Assessment of Pavement Sections in the Southern Central States Using FWD Parameters

The surface deflection bowl data collected through falling weight deflectometer (FWD) has been widely utilized by various department of transportation (DOTs) in the south-central states and other places. However, a robust method to evaluate pavement sections utilizing FWD data from all the sensors is seldom developed. There is always a need for DOTs and highway agencies to have a simplified procedure, which can be directly implemented in agencies’ databases. This study focuses on expanding and validating the concept of previously developed area ratio parameters towards the pavement section of south-central states (Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas) in effectively analyzing the pavement performances. Simulation-based deflections are utilized to develop enhanced deflection-based parameters and to reduce the need for extensive FWD testing in the field. Ninety-seven pavement sections in these states are considered to implement and validate simplified procedures that will be readily available to various transportation agencies to evaluate their pavement conditions at the network level. Eventually, a pavement ranking chart is proposed for the five south-central states, which categorizes the pavement section into very good, good, fair, and poor pavement sections.