Introduction of ProGroove Program

Transverse grooves in an airport pavement allow water to be ejected from beneath the tires of an aircraft moving at high speed. It has been found that the grooves can efficiently reduce the hydroplaning potential of a pavement during wet weather.

In the automatic device measurement of grooves, a laser sensor from a truss profiler constantly detected the distance between the grooved surface and an initial standard line as the aircraft tires repeatedly passed through the grooved areas. A special airport pavement groove identification program, ProGroove was developed to obtain the results of groove geometric parameters.

The ProGroove calculation is performed by comparing the vertical distance between individual profile data points with the corresponding low-pass filtered and bridging filtered data points. If their differences exceed the given threshold for a number of consecutive times, the first exceeded point is considered as the start point of a potential groove. Then, the end point of the potential groove is localized as the difference moves back to less than the given threshold. The groove depth is obtained from the difference between the top of the groove and the bottom of the groove. The top of groove value is determined from an average of the two maximum points of the groove which are the highest point on the left side and the right side of the groove. The bottom of groove value is simply taken as the lowest point of a groove, that is, the lowest point between the two maximum points of an individual groove.

ProGroove software was developed by Visual Basic .Net using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) interface. The program can remove the groove-like disturbances of joints in concrete pavements from the counted grooves and provides the groove number, location, depth and width, as well as a series of statistical results for groove quality analysis.