Desarrollo de la correlación entre dos indicadores de la condición de la superficie del pavimento

Abstract

The present research covers the determination of the Pavement Condition Index (PCI) and the International Roughness Index (IRI) of the Loja Avenue located at Cuenca city. The studied sector was divided into 86 smaller sections of 50 meters each. This study was done to find a correlation between these two indexes. The PCI qualifies the surface condition of the pavement, following the ASTM D6433 standard. The IRI measures the pavement roughness, which was obtained using the Roadroid application. Roadroid delivers two indexes, one focused on surface texture and the other on roughness, called eIRI and cIRI, respectively. According to the results obtained from the PCI, the 45 to 35 % of the sections present an excellent to fairly good condition, respectively, whereas a remaining 11 to 9 % have an acceptable and poor condition. In all the sections classified as poor, there exist the following distresses: lineal cracking, large patching and punchout. Concluding that these 3 types of distresses are the ones that cause a greater damage on the road functional state and cover great areas producing very important depressions on the road’s surface.

The IRI readings determined that road roughness varies from 4.8 m/km, classifying it as old and deteriorated pavement. The model obtained between PCI and cIRI reached a correlation of -0.79, indicating relatively high inverse lineal relation; meaning that the PCI is closely related with the texture of the rigid pavement.