Cracks in the road are very common and don’t always get the right attention.  Cracks don’t create complaints, discomfort, or extra noise so, as such, are not annoying nor disturbing.  However, cracks can quickly aggravate if not repaired straight away, and the longer it takes to repair those flaws the more expensive it will be. Nevertheless, cracks must be detected before repairing them. Small cracks are as hard to detect as raveling and most solutions fail to deliver an accurate and reliable crack condition of your road network. 

In this article, we focus on explaining how road cracks originate, how to detect them and repair them while maintaining spend.

Cracks: Causes and Effects

Cracks in the road surface occur:

• through different factors that are not well- or not enough – accounted for in the design, like material degradation, type and depth of the foundation, traffic type and frequency, heavy loads and load cycles, impact from surrounding vegetation, temperature and weather influence, etc… and/or
• by underlying causes like erosion of the pavement foundation due to leakage or soil waters and/or
• by simple wear and tear.

Cracks appear mostly in asphalt pavement.  And although cracks as such are not troublesome, they quickly evolve into potholes, subsidence, and undulation.  Cracks are openings for water and dirt to penetrate and attack the foundation and stability of the roads, imposing higher budget requirements to keep them functional. Therefore, they need fast repair.

Crack Management Solutions

Typically, visual inspections are carried out to monitor road conditions, but these are not efficient. Visual inspections rely on human supervision and take a long time to collect.  Advanced technology is used to obtain more efficiently a global overview of the asphalt conditions by detecting cracks that would have remained unnoticed using other methods. Advanced lidar technology can have a key role in strengthening efficiency and boosting road safety. XenomatiX’ solution uses the latest lidar technology combined with an HD camera and RTK gnss/ imu and processing algorithms to create a 6D digital representation of the road network, in a simple and short procedure: the roads are fully digitized, processing the crack detection on-board and/or overnight to auto-detect cracks on pavement; the next day the data is ready for evaluation and planning behind your desk using the overview in a GIS visualisation.

Conclusion

Cracks in the road are the whistle bells for upcoming disturbing and dangerous road degradation that quickly become very costly to repair.  So crack repair is the first step to control the road budget and can be executed in-house.  Opting for more regular and digital road surveys allows municipalities to control the crack repair budget and have a complete overview of all other pavement defects.