Ground-Penetrating Radar Evaluation of Moisture and Frost across Typical Saskatchewan Road Soils.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Civil Engineering Volume 2010, Article ID 416190, 9 pages doi:10.1155/2010/416190 Research Article Ground-Penetrating Radar Evaluation of Moisture and Frost across Typical Saskatchewan Road Soils Curtis Berthelot,1 Diana Podborochynski,1 Timo Saarenketo,2 Brent Marjerison,3 and Colin Prang4 1 Department of Civil and Geological Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, Canada S7N 5A9 2 Roadscanners Oy, Urheilukate 5-7, 96100 Rovaniemi, Finland 3 Preservation and Surfacing, Saskatchewan Ministry of Highways and Infrastructure, 350 3rd Avenue North, Saskatoon, SK, Canada S7K 2H6 4 Infrastructure Preservation, City of Saskatoon, 222 3rd Avenue North, Saskatoon, SK, Canada S7K 0J5 Correspondence should be addressed to Curtis Berthelot, curtis.berthelot@usask.ca Received 6 November 2009; Revised 22 April 2010; Accepted 20 July 2010 Academic Editor: Abolfazl Mohammadian Copyright © 2010 Curtis Berthelot et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This study was undertaken to evaluate the effect of soil type, moisture content, and the presence of frost on road substructure permittivity. Permittivity sensitivity of typical road soils was characterized in the laboratory to provide baseline dielectric constant values which were compared to field ground penetrating radar (GPR) survey results. Both laboratory devices, the complex dielectric network analyzer and the Adek Percometer, as well as the field GPR system were used in this study to measure the dielectric const