Monitoramento da qualidade de rolamento de pavimentos com dados de smartphones

Abstract

The longitudinal pavement roughness affects the road users, as it alters the rolling quality, reduce the traffic safety and its lifespam, and increases the Vehicle Operational Costs (VOC). Since the beginning of the 20th century lots of equipments were developed to measure this defect, although, methodologies that gather acuracy, high productivity and low cost of implementation haven’t been developed yet, which complicates the maintenance of an updated Database, necessary for the better functioning of a Pavement Management System (PMS). In the last years, studies that aimed to use accelerometers signals and Global Positioning Systems (GPS), installed in smartphones, for this kind of monitoring, due to its low use cost, easy operation and elevated rate of data acquisition. In this study, field tests were performed in pavement sections with different levels of roughness, in which vertical acceleration data was obtained through a smartphone fixed to a vehicle windshield, traveling in different speeds. These signals were treated and used to the calculation of Root Mean Square values (RMS), which have been correlated with International Roughness Index (IRI), obtained as refference by the Level and Rod method. The tests showed the system’s potential, especially in higher speeds, reaching correlation coefficients (Pearson’s R) of 0.86, and acceptable repeatability, with coefficients of variation between 2.7 and 7.9%. Therefore, it was concluded that these devices have high application potential when proper care is taken and appropriate treatments of datas are made.