EVALUATION OF EFFECT OF DRAINAGE QUALITY ON PERFORMANCE OF LOW VOLUME ROADS IN INDIA

Quality of drainage is an important parameter affecting the performance of low volume roads. There are various problems that arise due to inadequate road drainage system. Water remains on the roadway surface that can contribute to vehicle hydroplaning, in winter, standing water can freeze and cause skidding etc. It results in frequent and premature deterioration in sub- grade, base/ sub base as well as surface layers. In such cases, roads will need maintenance more often than a good quality drained road structure. These kinds of problems become more hazardous in case of low volume roads due to unpaved roads, less attention, poor ditches, poor cross slop etc. Low- volume roads make up 60 to 70 percentage of all roads worldwide. Adequate and timely maintenance of road drainage system is important to improve the performance of low volume roads. Therefore, there is a need to quantify the impact of quality of drainage on the performance of low volume roads in India and identify the critical maintenance components that affect drainage system. This study evaluates the effect of drainage quality with traffic growth rate, and saturation time on the performace of low volume roads in terms of roughness.The quality of drainage is considered as per AASTHO guidelines to compute the Modified Structural Number (SNC). The computed SNC were used to predict the performance of low volume roads in terms of roughness using deterioration models. Analysis and results indicated that rate of deterioration of the roads increases with the traffic growth rate, saturation time and drainage quality. It is expected that this study will be useful for the road engineers to develop some strategies for adequate and timely maintenance of road drainage system to ensure performance of low volume roa