07 – Multi-Functional Transport Infrastructures Training Week, Paris/Nantes – France, Monday 21th to Friday 27th of January 2019

 SMARTI Fellows ... Winter has come ... keep walking ... never look back .! 

Hello word...!!

Before we get into the main topic of the post, I would like to thank you all, pavement lovers, because we are now getting closer to pass the first milestone of the blog. We are approaching the 2,000 views and I am extremely pleased to tell you that there are viewers from all over the word, from Chile to New Zealand. Next milestone is to double the viewings before the end of the year so I count on you to make it happen.!

Well, let’s get back on “track”. On this occasion, I will be taking you to two of the most beautiful cities that Europe has, Paris and Nantes. As part of our training activities, the SMARTI ETN Consortium met once again for the third training week. The theme was Multi-Functional Transport Infrastructure and the locations for the meetings could not be better. In Paris, we were at  The École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées (National School of Road and Bridges). This well-known and prestigious school is one of the oldest in France and for a pavement engineer such as myself, a dream come true. The school was created in 1747 under the name of École Royale des Ponts et Chaussées by Daniel-Charles Trudaine, Civil Engineer and one of the primary developers of the present French road system. On Wednesday afternoon, we travelled to Nantes to visit The French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks (IFSTTAR), some of you might remember them from a previous post.

I could not resist to take a "selfie" at the entrance of such a prestigious School.

Every time that we, Early Stage Researchers (ESR), get together, we start by doing a group activity called “speed-dating” where we have the opportunity to put everyone up-to-date in the development of our projects. This time, Ana Jimenez del Barco Carrion who is the Project Manager, have a brilliant idea and grouped the researchers with similar projects or visions which to me made more sense when discussing progress and difficulties. As a result, we have managed to collaborate between ourselves and send an abstract call “Towards more sustainable Pavement Management practices using embedded sensor technologies” submitted to Infrastructure Open Access Journal under the SMARTI Special Issue. We all saw it as an opportunity to create conscience and see how our research life’s will continue once this wonderful experience comes to and end. So far, we are still having meetings and we have agreed on finishing the paper by the end of summer.

During our stay in Paris, we had a guide visit to “Sense-City”, a 9 million euros Facility for ANR’s Future Investment Program. Sense-City is a state-of-the-art climate chamber that can cover two 400m² areas (mini-city) equipped with sensors to study the performance of facilities and urban materials, monitor the city of tomorrow by sending appropriate information, and study air, water and soil pollution. We had a live demonstration on different projects but the most impressive was to see how they can simulate the sun-hours and its effect on the roads/houses/air/vegetation. One of the things that other fellows and I discussed was on the effect that this type of research has on the environment. We understand that in order to create something new, it needs to be studied and proved, but some of us believed that there was an excessive use of resources. Nonetheless, we hope the project keeps evolving and we look forward to seeing the results in the near future. Equally interesting was the presentation on Nano-technology and its use on civil engineering applications. SMARTI ESR-2 works with its solution and if you have been following my research will find some similarities.

With an old friend, Søren Rasmussen, from Dynatest Denmark and our guided visit to Sense-City.

In order to warm-up things, we had an internal competition called “Infra-hackathon”. We were asked to present a solution to a current mobility problem where we needed to increase the number of travellers without increasing the number of cars. Also, we needed to find a way to finance the project as there was not budget from central government and adding tolls was not an option. Wind energy harvesting was the most popular option among the groups as a way to make the infrastructure self-powered as well as smart barriers for traffic distribution. I guess the objective was to make the ESR’s think on how current infrastructure could be transformed to serve more than one purpose in the future.

The challenge: Infra-hackathon. Thanks Emmanuel.!

Finally, we had a guided visit to IFSTTAR Nantes where the concept Accelerated Pavement Testing (APT) was presented to us. Pier Hornych, LAboratory for Modelling, Experimentation and Survey of transport infrastructures (LAMES), introduced the Fatigue Carrousel and walked us through the process of designing, constructing, measuring, and modelling an APT experiment which was a lifetime experience for some of the ESR’s, specially for those who work/love pavement engineering. Personally, it was an enrichment experience to have a third visit to the carrousel and a motivation/challenge to promote this type of research back in my home country, Ecuador.   

Pier Hornych and Juliette Blanc walking us though the concept of APT.

SMARTI ETN group photo during our visit to the Fatigue Carrousel.

Well my beloved pavement lovers, I guess it’s time to end this post but keep in touch for more exciting news on the development of my project...!

Mario Manosalvas Paredes.

06 – Smart Transport Alliance (STA) Annual Conference, Brussels – Belgium, Tuesday 27th November

Figure 1. hey, watch out.! post in progress 😉

Hello word...!!

On this occasion, I will be writing a short post about the session that we, SMARTI ETN group, had last November (2018) in Brussels under the Smart Transport Alliance (STA) Annual Conference. As usual, I will start by giving a general overview of what STA is and does. The Smart Transportation Alliance is a not-for-profit global collaborative platform for transportation infrastructure innovation across modes and the Smart City. It was founded in December 2014 with headquarters in Brussels (Belgium) and meets every year; technical round-tables and training workshops are also organized by STA but with non-specific time frame. Finally, it should be highlighted that STA focus on providing smart infrastructure to connect people and business in a safe and sustainable way acknowledging that infrastructure competes with other important aspects of the public budget.

During our group presentation, each of the 15-fellows had 5-minutes to pitch their project to the audience. Below you can find my scrip and presentation. 

Figure 2. SmartEcoPave pitch

“We all make assumptions. We do it all the time. These assumptions can be about pretty much anything. Some assumptions are trivial and other are potentially devastating. Assumptions are guess based on three things: our imagination, past experience or wishful thinking; the problem with making assumptions is that more often than not, we are wrong and therefore, a lot of damage can be done by confusing our assumptions with the truth.

Pavement engineering has been driven by making assumptions since its origins. In 1876, Boussinesq introduced his method for homogeneous half space. In 1943 and 1945, Burmister developed a solution to calculate stresses and displacements in a two and three layer pavement system, respectively. Finally, in 1949 Odemark developed an approximate method to calculate stresses and strains in multilayer pavement systems. Nowadays, end of 2018, we (Pavement Engineers) are still making assumptions. In terms of designing a new pavement, we assume about the pavement model, the layer properties, travel speed, loading, climate, permissible stresses and strains, transfer functions and as a result, we will obtain the assumed future performance. What this really means is that we simply do not know what is happening with our structure. Generally, pavement design focus on two parameters, longitudinal strain at the bottom of the asphalt and the vertical strain at the top of the subgrade. I am going to talk about the longitudinal strain at the bottom of the asphalt. It is known that low strains are indicators of a good condition and vice-versa right? Most of the time we even prove these hypotheses in the laboratory and we felt like our design will last its design period. Unfortunately, this rarely occur in reality and the reason why is because we do not know how strains evolve with time but we could not know if we only have two points.

What if I tell you know that the scatter between the assumptions made at the office and the real pavement responses could be reduced? My name is Mario Manosalvas Paredes, I work for University of Nottingham and within my research project, we are studying a new type of low-cost battery less piezoelectric sensor that could measure and storage the longitudinal strain over time allowing pavement engineers either to validate their designs or to correct initial assumptions. We believe that once our sensor has been embedded in the asphalt, we will understand what is the real trend of the longitudinal strain and as a results of that, we will be able to determine the real performance of the structure.

Understanding whether or not our pavement will perform based onto our initial assumptions is not the ultimate goal that this project has. However, it is the fundamental one. Programming maintenance events based on the actual performance of the pavement and not just in time will allow road owners to allocate their budgets wiser. Thank you.!

I hope you liked the scrip guys. Stay tuned and see you soon pavement lovers!

Mario Manosalvas Paredes.

05 – Accelerated Pavement Testing at IFSTTAR, Nantes – France, Mon 14th Apr – Fri 18th Apr, 2018 & Mon 08th Oct – Fri 12th Oct, 2018

Hello word...!!

I hope that you are liking the blog. This is the fifth entry that I am making and just between us, I am getting used to it 😊. However, you have let me do all the “talking” and have not interacted with me which was one of the goals I had when I started blogging. Thus, I encourage you to share your thoughts, ideas, likes, dislikes under the comment tab at the end of the post.

On this occasion, I am writing about the two-work visits I had to the Fatigue Carrousel which is an Accelerated Pavement Testing (APT) facility owned by The French Institute of Science and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks (IFSTTAR). For those who know about what APT is and have hear about what IFSTTAR does then the next lines might be redundant; on the other hand, for those who are curious, specially for those with a pavement engineering orientation, I hope that you will continue searching on your own and perhaps in the near future we could have a discussion.

Figure 1: IFSTTAR Nantes.

John Metcalf under NCHRP: Synthesis of Highway Practices 235 “Application of Full-Scale Accelerated Pavement Testing” in Chapter 1, page 3 defines APT as “the controlled application of a prototype wheel loading, at or above the appropriate legal load limit to a prototype or actual, layered, structural pavement system to determine pavement response and performance under a controlled, accelerated accumulation of damage in a compressed time period” (Metcalf, 1996)” while IFSTTAR is a public research institution created in 2011 as a result from the merger of The French National Institute for Transport and Safety Research (INRETS) and the French Central Laboratory of Roads and Bridges (LCPC). IFSTTAR is composed by five departments: MAST, GERS, COSYS, TS2, and AME which can be seen by clicking the links.

There is some background information regarding the project that I am omitting in order to not make the post too extensive. Having say that, from now on, I will be a little bit more technical in order to describe what was the real purpose of my visit to Nantes. During the first seven months of my research I focused on literature review on piezoelectric materials, sensors, pavement performance, pavement modelling, damage modelling, basically in everything that could be related to link pavement responses to predict its future condition. In parallel, during one meeting with my research supervisor, he told me that our piezoelectric sensors, from now on PZT, were installed on the Fatigue Carrousel and that I should get ready to handle it. Until that point, I have not seen the PZT’s so I was more than ready to travel to Nantes to get the data and to have a brief introduction of the experiment.  Figure below shows the first I saw both PZT Carrousel.   

Figure 2: PZT developed at Michigan State University (MSU), USA.

Figure 3: Fatigue Carrousel during installation.  

APT was carried out between November 2017 and February 2018 where 1.0 million loads were applied. Temperature was measured at different depths (0.0, 50.0, and 100.0 millimetres). Wandering was studied through eleven positions, equally spaced, with a total length of 1.05 meters; position six was at the centre with radius 19.00 meters. Traffic followed a Gaussian distribution where position six bear 22% of it.  Following figures show how data was treated, from importing raw measurements to define an average signal, to then plot maximum values across the transverse position where wandering can be seen.   

Figure 4: Raw voltage after 500,000 load repetitions at radius 19.00 meters.

Figure 5: Average voltage after 500,000 load repetitions at radius 19.00 meters.

Figure 6: Strain responses from TML Gauge at 100 mm depth.

Figure 7: Voltage responses from PZT at 100 mm depth.

Finally, I cannot end this post without my moment of fame, respective selfie, on the Carrousel. In case you wonder, I used MATLAB (90%) and Excel Macros (10%) for processing the data. 

Figure 8: Your blogger with his respective selfie.

Long nights, such as this one, have gotten me closer to the main goal, The PhD.! Stay tuned and see you soon pavement lovers!

Mario Manosalvas Paredes.

04 – Summer Training School, Palermo – Italy, Mon 03rd Sep – Fri 07th Sep, 2018

Hello word...!!

As promised before, I am trying to catch up with you therefore, this time I am writing about the summer school we, SMARTI-Fellows, had in gorgeous Palermo during the first week of September last year. For those who have been reading my blog since the beginning will know that SMARTI is the acronym for “Sustainable Multi-functional Automated Resilient Transport Infrastructure” right? For those who did not know then I kindly invite you to click on the next link where you will find about our projects and our dissemination activities 😊.

Figure 1: SMARTI ETN Summer School.

Well, let’s move on and focus on the theme of the post which relays on the first pillar that we have in SMARTI, Sustainability. Our week was thought, we had eighteen lectures in four-days from 09:00 to 17:30 supposedly, but in reality, we were finishing around 19:00 most of the days; this is to let you know that despite the traveling we are doing it we are working really hard in achieving a better world where theory and novel developments face every day problems towards better infrastructures.

Summer school was divided between Photogrammetry, Monitoring Vibrations, Recycling in Asphalt Pavements, Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), and Introducing to Sustainability in Education. Fabio Remondino from 3D Optical Metrology (3DOM) walked us through 3D surveying techniques applied to Civil Infrastructures where different equipment’s were mentioned highlighting pros and cons. To be honest, I was a little sceptical at the beginning of the lecture since I could not really think how aerial photography could compare with more traditional methods such as Laser Crack Measurement Systems (LCMS) which I knew from my time at Dynatest Denmark A/S. At the end, we conclude agreeing that in order to choose technology, we need to ask ourselves if the chosen technology fits the requirements of the project and equally important the BUDGET.!  Below it can be seen an image from Fabio’s presentation where a project on energy consumption was explained from data acquisition to data management. Something that called my attention was the price for the aerial measurement. Do you want to take a guess? Tip: for a municipality and even for a big consulting department will not be that much.  

Figure 2: 3D cities with photogrammetry

During our training, we did not only receive theory but had the opportunity to test our new skills in photogrammetry thanks to University of Palermo – UNIPA. Laura Inzerillo led the lecture named “UAV photogrammetry for pavement distress analysis: application and processing” where the work of Ronal Roberts, ESR12, was shown. After the lecture we were ready to collect data unfortunately we could not have the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flying under traffic and pedestrians due to regulations and safety therefore we had to settle with something else.  The following images show the process of collecting data plus the analysis we made. For those interested, we used Agisoft which is a friendly software with lots of tutorials for you to explore. 

Figure 3: UAV data acquisition and differences between

Figure 4: Agisoft software post processing.

Recycling in Asphalt Pavements and Sustainability Assessment was conducted by Gaetano Di Mino from University of Palermo and Davide Lo Presti from University of Nottingham respectively. Both were great presentation which lead to intensive discussion between speakers, fellows and supervisors. In my view, there is still a lot of work that need to be paved before LCA/LCC/LCCA concepts can be truly implemented at project level size. Legislation at European Union (EU) level will be the only way that younger generations will push forward these concepts. Also, monetarizing LCA/LCC/LCCA will help engineers to understand the real concept of sustainability however this could be seen as contradictory. What to do then? 

Figure 5: Gaetano Di Mino (left) and Davide Lo Presti (right).

Finally, we had the pleasure of being lectured by John Harvey from University of California – Davis who was the key-speaker of the week. For those who have the pleasure of work, breath, and feel road engineering will know who John is and his vast contributions to damage models through mechanistic-empirical (M-E) approaches as well as sustainability which was the topic of his talk. 

Figure 6: John Harvey presenting a California case study om Sustainability.

Personally, it was great seeing John again. We first met in Copenhagen back in 2016 but we did not have much time to talk however in Palermo, I had three days to learn from him. The beauty of technology is how connects people and as a proof, John and I sent this photo to a common friend in Chile, Erwin Kohler, who we both remember with great appreciation. Erwin, if you are reading this, thanks for everything.!

 Figure 7: John Harvey (right) and your blogger, Mario.

There are still lot of thing I have not tell you about my journey so, stay tuned and see you soon pavement lovers!

Mario Manosalvas Paredes.

03 – International Society for Asphalt Pavements 2018, Fortaleza – Brazil, Tue 19th Jun – Thu 21 Jun, 2018

Hello word...!!

I have to say that lot of things have happened since my last entry, which was almost a year ago, so I promise that I will write a few posts so you can know where I have been and what I have done within my PhD journey 😊.!

In this entry, I will explain my views and anecdotes on what it was my first international conference as a Marie Curie Research Fellow. The name of the conference was: International Society for Asphalt Pavements (ISAP) which is a volunteer organization of professionals and experts in asphalt engineering whose goal is to share the latest in leading edge asphalt pavement technology worldwide. ISAP conferences occur every four-years having its first appearance in 1962 at Ann Arbor, Michigan. Fifty-six years later, I had the great opportunity to attend the thirteenth ISAP conference held in Fortaleza, Brazil between the 19 and 21 of June 2018. 

Figure 1: ISAP Conference Venue at Hotel Gran Marquise

For any pavement engineer, it was for me at least, see the name of key-speakers such as Andre Molenaar (UT Delft, Netherlands), Hervé Di Benedetto (University of Lyon / ENTPE, France), Kim Jenkins (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa), and many others, was already worth attending the conference and off course, they did not let the attenders down with their presentations. Professor Molenaar walk us through “Pavement Design, where did we come from and where are we going?” which I enjoyed very much. From his lecture, I truly connected when he mentioned that we will not move further if we keep making assumptions, wrong most of the time, on the performance of basic inputs for pavement design which in a way motivated me to talk to him, privately, and explain him the idea behind SmartEcoPave. All in all, Andre showed interest on my topic and shared some of his bibliography plus he put me in contact with two of his former PhD students.

Figure 2: Professor Andre Molenaar on the left and your blogger, Mario.

If I keep talking of all the researchers I met during ISAP this post might turn, in length, as a chapter of my Thesis and right now we do not want that 😉. Nevertheless, I would not like to miss the opportunity to mention some of the people I met and had a talk. Figure 3 shows Richard Kim (North Carolina State University, USA) top left-side, Kim Jenkins (University of Stellenbosch, South Africa) top right-side, Luis Guillermo Loria-Salazar (LANAMME-UCR, Costa Rica) bottom left-side, Emmanuel Chailleux (IFSTTAR, France) bottom centre, and Breixo Gomez (University of Nottingham, UK) bottom right-side.  

Figure 3: World-class speakers at ISAP Conference.

As an overall conclusion, I gained knowledge from all the presentations I attended where I also had the chance to dream on how my Piezoelectric Sensors will enter in the non-stopping development’s world of pavements. Also important, had the time to relax and to strength relations with colleagues from Spain and Chile.

Figure 4: Colleagues from Spain and Chile during our last dinner together.

Stay tuned and see you soon pavement lovers!

Mario Manosalvas Paredes.