STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: Each month, or every other month, a student will provide a 1-page illustrated abstract of the research they are currently conducting. This is a wonderful opportunity for the student, our International Society for Concrete Pavements (ISCP) Members, and technology/research transfer to our concrete paving industry.
The ISCP “STUDENT RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT” March 2022 is Sampath Kumar Pasupunuri, Ph.D. Candidate-Pavement Engineering-School of Civil Engineering, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom.
BIO:
Sampath Kumar Pasupunuri is a Ph.D. candidate studying pavement engineering in the school of civil engineering at the University of Nottingham, UK under the supervision of Dr. Nick Thom. His Ph.D. is sponsored by the National Highways, UK. He earned his master’s degree in transportation engineering from Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, India, and has seven years of experience in the field of pavement engineering.
Title: “Predicting Concrete Pavement Deterioration”
Abstract:
Prediction models are used by road construction agencies to manage maintenance needs, allocate funding, assign resources, and prioritise and plan maintenance tasks. Predictive analytics can provide useful information on the location, timing, and type of failures that are expected to occur. In other words, information on the time, location, and scale of anticipated failures enable highway maintenance agencies in planning for the treatment of those failures. The lack of such information is one of the fundamental disadvantages of reactive maintenance. National Highways, UK has launched the ‘Legacy Concrete Roads’ program as a part of the renewal and maintenance strategy that will make sure that concrete roads remain safe, dependable and durable. Legacy concrete currently refers to exposed concrete or concrete road with less than 50mm of asphalt overlay. This Ph.D. study was funded by National Highways and aimed to develop a trustworthy method of predicting future performance based on known characteristics where inputs will be related to information from in-situ monitoring and outputs formulated to be suited to National Highway’s decision-making processes. The development of concrete pavement deterioration models will be critical for the decision-making process, and the pavement management cycle is illustrated in Figure 1.
The different pavement performance models used for predicting the deterioration are studied to understand the failure mechanism and collect engineering knowledge on pavement deterioration. This research is carried out based on the hypothesis that the concrete pavements deteriorate over time due to environmental factors, dynamic traffic effects, bond between the layers and design parameters. This results in the development of different distress in concrete pavements such as cracking, joint failure, spalling, faulting, punchouts, blowups etc. To achieve the objective, data of all these distresses in the concrete pavement were collected and compiled from different sources. This step includes data exploration for the collection and compilation of datasets from various primary and secondary sources, pre-processing includes cleansing, reduction, and feature extraction.
A set of independent variables considered to influence pavement deterioration is selected based on observing the performance of different concrete road sections in the UK. It is complemented by evaluating the past research studies on concrete pavement deterioration around the world including AASHTO, Austroads, HDM etc. The prepared data will be used for empirical analysis which includes machine learning algorithms such as Artificial Neural Network and Reinforcement Learning. A series of finite element analysis as shown in Figure 2 is also performed in the current study to mechanistically derive the stresses, strains and deformations. The calculated stresses/strains along with the data collected from the site will be used to derive the empirical relation between the distresses and factors associated with those distresses.
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ISCP would like to feature a “STUDENT RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT” each month, or every other month. If you would like to nominate a student, or if you are a student and would like to nominate yourself or a colleague, please send ISCP an email to: newsletter@concretepavements.org
ALL SPOTLIGHTS:
DECEMBER 2021—Inaugural: Katelyn Kosar, Phd Student-Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering-University of Pittsburgh (Pitt): www.concretepavements.org/2021/12/14/new-at-iscp-student-research-spotlight/
JANUARY 2022: Aniruddha Baral, Ph.D. Candidate-Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering-University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign: www.concretepavements.org/2022/01/15/student-research-spotlight-jan-2022/
FEBRUARY 2022: Jordan Ouellet, Tech, BEng, MASc, PhD Candidate, Teaching and Research Assistant-University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: www.concretepavements.org/2022/02/26/student-research-spotlight-february-2022/