Quality Control and Quality Assurance

 

In road construction and rehabilitation projects it is vital for the road owners to be sure that the work has been done according to the design documents and guidelines and that they have received the product that they have paid for. On the other hand road contractors also need to have a system to monitor the quality of their own work.  For either of these quality control / quality assurance tasks, Roadscanners personnel have developed different survey techniques and software, based on GPR, laser scanning and thermal camera techniques, to ensure that road structures are both thick and stiff enough. One example of such a technique is the use of GPR to measure the air void content of new asphalt pavements, a method which has been in use in Finland as a routine technique in HMA projects for more than 10 years.

In recent years, Roadscanners has developed, in Finland and in Sweden, a new 3D quality assurance measurement system where the whole pavement structure, which provides a full cross section of the entire road, is measured, analysed and compared to design documents. Assurance of structural uniformity in 3D is especially important because, according to a study made by Roadscanners in Sweden, the majority of road damage develops on locations where the structural thicknesses vary in a cross section.