Nondestructive Testing in Pavement QA
NCHRP's "Incorporating Nondestructive Testing in Quality Assurance of Highway Pavement Construction" assists state DOTs in selecting and incorporating nondestructive testing (NDT) into their Quality Assurance (QA) programs for highway pavement construction.
As part of their routine practice, state DOTs use various QA procedures in their acceptance process for highway pavement construction. Absent from this QA process is the use of NDT methods, despite their many potential benefits to the process.
NDT technologies have been in use for many decades in numerous industries involving the evaluation, inspection, control, and acceptance of materials and constructed products. Their use in the pavement construction assessment area has been modest but has gained traction since the 1990s. NDT technologies are increasingly considered suitable to replace conventional destructive QA tests to assess quality during construction in real time.
A separate Conduct of Research Report is also available, which provides the research basis behind the published manual presented here.
Who is NCHRP?
The National Cooperative Highway Research Program conducts research in problem areas that affect highway planning, design, construction, operation, and maintenance in the United States.
Administered under the Transportation Research Board (TRB), NCHRP is a collaborative effort between the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the National Academy of Sciences.
Nondestructive Testing
ASTM International defines NDT as: The development and application of technical methods to examine materials or components in ways that do not impair future usefulness and serviceability in order to detect, locate, measure, and evaluate discontinuities, defects, and other imperfections; to assess integrity, properties, and composition; and to measure geometrical characteristics.
In highway pavement construction, the benefit of NDT is to assess the quality of highway materials in-place, without disturbing the production and construction process.
