Analysis of roughness performance of chloride-stabilised rural roads

ABSTRACT

Rural roads play a crucial role in the economic and social development of societies. Therefore, they should be managed accordingly and supported by consistent public policies and suitable management practices. Maintenance requirements and costs depend upon the desired serviceability expected for the prevailing traffic, which can be estimated from the road roughness. Given the increasing use of chloride stabilisers to improve the service level of rural roads, it is crucial to objectively assess the performance of these roads over time to perform life-cycle cost analyses for effective management. The objective of this study was to assess the roughness of chloride-stabilised rural roads over time and to propose a performance model from the analysis. As a result, a model for roughness prediction of chloride-stabilised roads was developed and successfully validated, considering an exponential estimation curve based on the age of the road. The proposed model is statistically significant, considering a 95% confidence level range of IRI predicted ± 0,88 m/km. This result indicates that age provides confident information about the IRI. This model is proposed for network-level management of rural roads in terms of IRI.

KEYWORDS:

• Chloride-stabilised road
• roughness performance
• International Roughness Index (IRI)
• rural roads

Acknowledgements

The research team acknowledges Fondecyt-Conicyt Chile for funding the project Fondecyt 11121535 ‘Development of Performance Models for Network Level Management of Sealed Rural Roads’. The collaboration of the following persons is very appreciated: Carolina Encina, Felipe Rivera, Ignacio Barrios, Anibal Godoy and Felipe Halles. Special acknowledgments to the Departments of the Ministry of Public Works who support the project, and companies Sal Lobos and Salmag. Special thanks to consulting Gesinfra for collaboration with the HDM-4 simulations. Furthermore, the support of the National Research Center for Integrated Natural Disaster Management CONICYT/FONDAP/15110017 is sincerely appreciated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico [grant number 11121535].