RPB HEALTEC · Road Pavements & Bridge Deck Health Monitoring/Early Warning Using Advanced Inspection Technologies

The European Road Network is undoubtedly one of the most important land infrastructures in the EU. It is and will remain for the foreseeable future a crucial artery for Europe, both in economic terms, as it services the vast majority of goods traffic, and in social terms, as it does so for passenger travel as well.Maintenance is considered to be the most expensive function of a high-way operating agency, so there is a special need for the early detection of deterioration mechanisms and of potential presence of defects through a more advanced road pavements inspection technology.The proposed system will detect the presence of defects, determine the cause, extent and rate of deterioration, provide information for assessing stability and serviceability and for evaluating the cost-effectiveness of various remedial measures and provide this information in real time, not causing traffic disturbances.The system is aiming to upgrade and optimize the inspection & maintenance of the European roads, reducing costs and increasing traffic safety and will achieve this by developing a novel automated and integrated NDT (Non Destructive Techniques) system for high speed analysis and evaluation. It will demonstrate the value of combining 3 technologies: Ground Penetrating Radar, InfraRed Thermography and Air Coupled Ultrasonic testing with Near Real-Time data transfer and analysis as a reliable, fast and safe tool for pavement inspections, as well as a great business opportunity for SME participants in EU. The proposed system incorporates and drastically enhances the capacities of the traditional NDT techniques, to produce quantitative, reliable, precise, continuous and at-traffic-speed measurements for the assessment of structural pavement condition. Research & innovation outcomes will be to obtain a GPR capable of detecting subsurface defects and adjacent layers of the same materials at traffic speed and quantitative and high speed image capturing Thermography resulting in the approximately 100% coverage measurement tool, which can be further extended with ACU optimized for continuous surface layer profiling.