ARRB presents at SURF2022 amid European visit

ARRB’s expertise in the road surface space has featured at one of the industry’s most prestigious and important gatherings in Europe.

ARRB’s Discipline Lead in Infrastructure Measurement Richard Wix and colleague Malcolm Mak attended the recent Symposium on Pavement Surface Characteristics (SURF2022) in Milan, Italy.

Richard gave the opening plenary workshop of the symposium with co-presenter Gerardo Flintsch from Virginia Tech in the USA – called State Of The Art and Advancements in Measurement of Surface Characteristics – which was well received.

Richard, who was part of the local organising committee for the Milan event, also presented a paper entitled Use of Traffic-Speed Ravelling Data for Resurfacing Intervention on Open Graded Asphalt – a a joint effort between Richard and Main Roads Western Australia co-authors Chloe Ip and Lalinda Karunaratne. Both Chloe and Lalinda were able to join in the viewing of the presentation from their offices in Perth.

The symposium covered a plethora of topics relating to the surface characteristics of pavements including measurement, maintenance, modeling, sustainability, materials, quality control and safety with both a current and future focus.

More than 300 participants from 39 countries attended SURF2022.

ARRB previously hosted SURF2018 in Brisbane.

Prior to the conference, Malcolm and Richard visited Greenwood Engineering in Denmark, who are involved in manufacturing the Intelligent Pavement Assessment Vehicles (iPAVE) that ARRB uses to measure and monitor Australia and New Zealand’s road network.

They toured the facilities in Denmark and discussed new developments including web based remaining life software, data mining and use of the Traffic Speed Deflectometer for measuring runways.

Richard also gave a presentation to Greenwood staff about ARRB’s emergence as the National Transport Research Organisation (NTRO).

Richard and Malcolm visited the Danish Road Directorate with Matteo Pettinari discussing rolling resistance, simplified remaining life calculations using TSD deflection data without layer thicknesses and the Live Road Assessment (LiRA) project which involves collecting data from sensors in regular passenger cars and using machine learning to develop models to assess road condition.

They visited Bjarne Schmidt at ARRB Systems Europe just over the border in Hyllie, Sweden and also Roger Moller from Ramboll in Malmo, Sweden to discuss developments in technology and high speed deflection measurements.

Richard also attended the PIARC TC 4.1 committee meeting before heading off to Louven, Belgium to talk with ARRB’s technology partner Xenomatix about new developments in solid state LiDAR for pavement condition monitoring and future collaboration, before visiting BASt in Germany (the equivalent of ARRB) to discuss a variety of topics including use of GPR and analyses of TSD data.

The visit concluded with a trip to their most impressive duraBASt test track where they perform accelerated loading, vehicle certification and testing of materials/surfacings.