European Collaboration

Flooded Pavement Assessment

This project was selected as a potential collaborative project between the European Union (EU) and the U.S. Department of Transportation's (DOT) Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center. [Read more about this partnership.]

For EU Candidates

Selected projects will address development and deployment of pavement assessment techniques related to moisture in pavements in the context of flooding, and should capitalize on the existing experience available in the United States. It is expected that the U.S. DOT will fund U.S. projects on these topics and that EU selected projects addressing these topics are expected to cooperate closely with the relevant U.S. funded projects. Part of the budget of the EU funded projects should be set aside for associated coordination activities.

For U.S. Candidates

The project listed below should address development and deployment of pavement assessment techniques related to moisture in pavements in the context of flooding, and should capitalize on the existing experience available in Europe. It is expected that the European Commission (EC) will fund an EC project on this topic and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) contractor selected for the project is expected to cooperate closely with the contractor selected for the relevant EC-funded project. The bidders should specify what level of activity and budget is proposed for associated coordination activities with the EC funded projects.

Flooded Pavement Assessment

Link for the formal solicitation (request for proposal) on FedBizOps: Proposal deadline is September 27, 2012.

On November 28, 2011, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced $215 million in assistance to states around the country, where a variety of natural disasters had taken a toll on the infrastructure. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said “Communities suffering from disasters have been hard at work restoring vital transportation links so that people can resume daily activities as soon as possible.”

Research is needed to achieve the following objectives:

• Identify when emergency vehicles can safely be allowed on roads of different types, and on different soils, that have been or are flooded to various degrees (i.e., depths and durations).
• Determine the best times to allow heavy repair equipment on the roads (e.g., in terms of the tradeoff between the user costs of road closure (and detours) versus costs of increased road damage).
• Determine the effects of floods on long-term pavement performance.
• Develop guidelines for use by highway agencies on how to assess flooded pavements for both short-term and long-term impacts.

Planned Research Activities: This project will be conducted in two phases. The first phase will consist of a literature review of methods, including equipment (e.g., falling-weight deflectometer (FWD) and ground penetrating radar (GPR)) and instrumentation that could be applied to evaluate the near term load capacity and the long-term pavement damage due to floods and development of a detailed work plan, for Phase II of the study that addresses the equipment, models, tools, instruments, procedures and approach to evaluate flooded pavements. This work should result in analytical procedures to determine the optimum time when pavements can be reopened to vehicles of certain weights, and the long-term effects of floods on pavement performance.

This second phase could include new data collection, or the use available data from previous floods, to demonstrate and validate the procedures developed.