Crack sealing is an important part of many road maintenance programs as sealing can help slow the rate of deterioration due to prevention of water ingress into deeper sub-layers of pavement.

In Pavement Management Systems, sealed cracks must be reported separately from unsealed cracks and are often assigned a lower severity to reflect their tendency to slow pavement deterioration. The performance of sealed cracks over time is also often tracked to aid in the identification of the best time to perform resealing.

However 2D pavement inspection systems cannot accurately detect and quantify sealed cracking as sealed cracks simply appear to be very wide unsealed cracks.

Pavemetrics^® Laser Crack Measurement System (LCMS^®-2) solves this problem through the combined analysis of 2D intensity and 3D texture data.

Pavement sections containing both sealed and unsealed cracks can be handled easily and quantities of both types of cracking can be reported separately. Cracking with failed sealing can also be detected and reported.

Location and length of sealed cracking is reported in XML along with 2D and 3D images showing sealed cracking and unsealed cracking high-lighted separately.

AASHTO

PP67; Can quantify cracking (location, orientation, width, but not “type”*)
PP68; Can collect images of pavement surfaces

*Pavemetrics has developped a simplified Crack Classification Protocol, See MTQ Cracking Protocol

ASTM

D5340; Can be used for airport condition index surveys
D6433; Can be used for Roads and parking lot pavement condition index surveys

Related Articles

Using Full Lane 3D Road Texture Data for the Automated Detection of Sealed Cracks, Bleeding and Raveling
Authors: John Laurent, Jean-François Hébert and Mario Talbot (Pavemetrics)

Automated Detection of Sealed Cracks Using 2D and 3D Road Surface Data
Authors: John Laurent, Jean-François Hébert and Mario Talbot (Pavemetrics)