INFLUENCE OF HEAVY RAINFALLS ON ROAD SAFETY

I. Becchi, L. Domenichini, F. La Torre E. Caporali

Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, Università di Firenze

The VERT Research Project, aimed at evaluating the influence of heavy rainfalls on road safety, has recently been funded by the European Community BRITE Programme. Within this Project an experimental campaign will be carried out to measure water thickness on in service road pavement surfaces under different rainfall conditions. The survey will be carried out without any interference with the traffic flow by means of a contactless technique based on video image analysis. A self activating monitoring station consisting of a videocamera, an automatic pluviometer, a disdrometer and a portable pc will collect the experimental data. The results will be analysed to find out possible relationships between the rainfall parameters (rain intensity, duration, impact energy) and the water film thickness measured analysing the videoimages of the water surface collected during the rainfalls. The experimental data will be compared with the theoretical ones predicted by a physical model developed within the VERT project. The model is based on the road surfaces geometric layout, pavement texture and rainfall intensity. The report will describe the experimental set up and will refer about the preliminary results obtained.