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.

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.