Laboratory Testing Of Paving Materials

The Highway Engineering Laboratory is a teaching and research laboratory equipped to conduct standard tests for asphalt pavement design and paving materials for undergraduate teaching, as well as advanced research oriented experiments for assessing the engineering properties and behaviours of new paving materials. It is also well equipped to support research activities in the area of nondestructive field evaluation of in-service road and airport pavements. In addition, the laboratory carries a good collection of in-house developed software for closed-form analysis of pavement responses under traffic and thermal loadings, pavement properties backcalculation, and laboratory and field permeability determination of porous pavement materials.

In the last 15 years, the research team of the Highway Engineering Laboratory has graduated more than 15 PhD and 20 Masters' research students. The major research works performed at the laboratory since the 1980s cover the following areas:

• Nondestructive structural assessment of road and airfield pavements;
• Durability evaluation of asphalt paving mixtures;

K Meter For In Situ Measurement Of Permeability Of Porous Pavement

• Characterisation of thermal properties of asphalt and concrete paving mixtures;
• Skid resistance determination and modeling for highways and airport runways;
• Pavement drainage studies and permeability determination of pavement materials;
• Modeling of highway and airport pavement performance;
• Pavement maintenance programming and budget planning;
• Pavement management systems;
• Environmental impact assessment of highway developments.

Research works at the well-established Highway Engineering Laboratory have gained good recognitions internationally through the prizes and awards that its research members have won since the 1990s. The main prizes and awards are shown in the following list:

• ASCE Frank M. Masters Transportation Engineering Award (2005) for innovative research in highway and airfield pavements.
• Singapore Ministry of Transport Minister's Innovation Award (2003) for achievements in CAAS-NUS collaborative research in developing a GPS/GIS based airport pavement condition survey system.
• Singapore Prime Minister's Office TEC 2002 (The Enterprise Challenge) Award (2002) for CAAS-NUS joint research project on airport pavement management system.
• IES Engineering Achievement Award (2000) for developing of a nondestructive in-situ permeability measurement device for expressway pavements.
• Katahira Best Paper Award at 8th REAAA Conference (1995) for research on developing an expedient method of determining the thermal properties of asphalt and concrete paving materials.
• ASCE Arthur M. Wellington Prize for Best Paper (1992) for research on developing a procedure for conducting life-cycle costing of pavement management strategies.
• Katahira Best Paper Award at 7th REAAA Conference (1992) for research that developed genetic-algorithm based technique in network level optimal programming of pavement management activities.

Members of the research team of the Highway Engineering Laboratory have maintained an active programme pursuing collaborative research with industrial partners. Listed below are the sponsored research projects in collaboration with various industrial partners:

Skid Resistance Testing Of Highway

• Land Transport Authority of Singapore -- Nondestructive evaluation of in-service road pavements; characterization of truck loadings on Singapore roads; development of skid resistant wearing course for road pavements; techniques for expedient in-situ measurements of porous asphalt pavement of expressways; workzone safety and evaluation; performance of recycled asphalt pavements.
• Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore -- Nondestructive evaluation of in-service airport pavements; airport pavement condition survey techniques; airport pavement management system; skid resistance of runway pavements; roughness evaluation of runway pavements.
• Ministry of the Environment/National Environment Agency -- Use of recycled materials for road pavement construction; development of porous asphalt and concrete pavements for area drainage control.
• NatSteel Asia Pte Ltd -- Use of steel slag for highway and airfield pavement construction; skid resistance evaluation of steel slag; use of lime as additive for asphalt paving mixtures
• BP Singapore Pte Ltd -- Fuel consumption studies and performance of hydrogen cell vehicles
• Neptune Orient Lines -- Port loading studies
• Shell Eastern Petroleum (Pte) Ltd -- Applications of modified asphalt for highway pavement constructions
• Esso Singapore Pte Ltd - Improved asphalt mix design for airport taxiway pavements
• Resource Development Corporation (Singapore) Pte Ltd -- Road construction and roughness evaluation
• Samwoh Asphalt Premix Pte Ltd -- runway rideability study; highway network pavement management systems; nondestructive structural evaluation of road pavements
• Ley Choon Construction and Engineering Pte Ltd -- Mix design for asphalt pavement recycling