Sampietrini stone pavements: Distress analysis using pavement condition index method

摘要

In several Italian cities, it is possible to find historical pavements such as the Sampietrini\udpavements, which are mainly located in the center of the city of Rome. The Sampietrini pavement\udis a particular road surface paved in natural stone with irregular sharp elements that are assembled\udby hand with the evident not plan effect. Because of their peculiarities, they are not suitable for\udstreets where high speed is allowed. In many cases, high vibration and noise levels due to road\udtraffic traveling on Sampietrini pavements are caused by inadequate maintenance, which is also\udaffected by the absence of specific evaluation criteria regarding surface conditions and performances\udof Sampietrini pavements. It is not possible, in fact, to adopt common approaches developed to be\udused for flexible and rigid pavements, because they present completely different features and\uddistresses. In this paper, to overpass this problem, a new evaluation criterion based on Pavement\udCondition Index (PCI) method established for block pavements is proposed. Furthermore, to fully\udcharacterize this kind of pavements, other analyses, i.e., International Roughness Index (IRI) and\udcomfort level evaluation based on ISO 2631 standard, were also carried out. The results showed a\udgood correlation between PCI and IRI approaches (R2 = 0.82), also highlighting that new or\udreconstructed Sampietrini pavements present not negligible roughness level. This aspect was also\udconfirmed estimating the comfort level perceived by users traveling at several speeds (≤50 km/h).\udFinally, speed related threshold values to be adopted for PCI and IRI methods are proposed.\udThe proposed method can be implemented by pavement managers in a PMS ad hoc for stone block\udpaving and thus, it can be integrated with other equivalents methods of visual inspection based\udon PCI.