Development of a Simulation-Based Approach for Cold In-Place Recycled Pavement Moisture-Content Prediction Using Ground-Penetrating Radar

Abstract

Ground-penetrating radar (GPR) recently has been used for quality control and quality assurance of the asphalt concrete (AC) pavement-construction process. The objective of this study was to investigate the feasibility of estimating, by using GPR, the moisture content in AC pavement. This application is particularly important for emulsion-stabilized cold in-place recycling (CIR) and cold central-plant recycling (CCPR), where monitoring the moisture content is necessary for deciding the timing of opening the road to traffic, overlay placement, or both. Four field tests were performed using GPR on CIR- or CCPR-treated AC pavement. A numerical simulation model of AC pavement with internal moisture was generated using the information from mix design, and virtual GPR tests were performed using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. After calibration, a moisture-prediction formula derived from the simulation model was used to correlate the dielectric constant predicted by GPR to the moisture content within cold recycled layers. The GPR signal was “denoised” by improving its stability and mitigating the measured-height mismatch. The in-situ moisture content was predicted using the proposed method and compared with field-collected samples. Results showed that the proposed method is effective in estimating CIR- and CCPR-layer moisture content. The variation of dielectric constants in field tests is also discussed. A testing protocol for predicting moisture content using GPR is suggested for CIR and CCPR pavement.