| dc.description.abstract | The objective of this research was to leverage research done abroad in Australia and New Zealand, as well as research conducted within the United States to determine the role pavement preservation treatments have on safety aspects, pavement skid number and pavement macrotexture, of the highway system (7, 8, 9). Methods for pavement preservation range in variety from a simple chemical treatment, like a fog seal, to a more complex surface treatment, like a chip seal or overlay, to the sophisticated mechanical treatments, like shot-blasting. To meet the objective of this study, certain data was gathered for each pavement preservation treatment included for analysis. This data included microtexture measurements, and since it was deemed unreasonable to utilize the British Pendulum Tester considering the variability and difficult nature of field research, the American Society for Testing and Material's (ASTM) E274 skid tester was used to create an index for microtexture (10). Two separate tests were used to determine the macrotexture values for each treatment; they are the Transit New Zealand T/3 sand circle test (11) and the ASTM E965 outflow meter tester (12). A thorough anaylsis of available life cycle cost models was needed to establish economic data to each pavement preservation treatment, thus meeting the primary objective of this study. This will allow pavement managers to have the required information to be able to make rational engineering design decisions based on both physical and financial data for a suite of potential pavement preservation tools. | |
