Study on the Skid Resistance Deterioration Behavior of the SMA Pavement

The skid resistance of asphalt pavement is of great importance to the driving safety, but deterioration of pavement skid resistance is inevitable owing to the coupling effect of traffic loading and climate conditions. The existing prediction models of skid resistance were mainly established based on the laboratory accelerated polishing tests (for instance Polished Stone Value, PSV), and these models can only consider the influence of a single factor; they fail to reflect the coupling effect of different factors under the real service condition. For the purpose of investigating the influences of seasonal variation, and aggregate type on the skid resistance of asphalt pavement, the skid resistance of three test tracks were continuously measured for 48 months through five different test methods. The results show that different test methods exhibit significant inconsistency. The aggregate type is the internal factor that determines the long-term skid resistance performance of pavement. The skid resistances of the selected test tracks were ranked as greywacke pavement > diabase pavement > rhyolite pavement. This is in well agreement with the ranking of aggregate polishing resistance obtained from the laboratory Wehner/Schulze (W/S) test. This indicates that the W/S test is effective in distinguishing the aggregates that used in pavement construction. It is also found that the skid resistance of asphalt pavement shows significant fluctuation with respect to seasonal variation. The skid resistance is generally high in autumn and low in summer. Therefore, it is suggested to use the low measurement value of skid resistance in summer as the lower limit for the evaluation and prediction of the skid resistance performance of asphalt pavement.