Wide-Area Dynamic Sensing Method of Water Film Thickness on Asphalt Runway

Abstract Water film thickness is of great significance to the skid-resistant performance of an asphalt runway. Obtaining the precise information of water film thickness can help to assess the skid resistance with higher accuracy. This article proposes a wide-area dynamic sensing method of water film thickness on asphalt runway. The model, considering precipitation time-variability, runway geometry, and runway surface characteristics, is established to extract spatial temporal information of water film thickness dynamics on runway during intense rainfall. The model optimization is further conducted to deal with the problems of slope change, singularity issue, and time-spatial evolution of water film, which extends the single-point water film sensing to the large-area sensing. In order to evaluate the developed method, the calculations of water film thickness from the model are compared with the results obtained from a laboratory rainfall simulation experiment. The results show that the method has high accuracy in sensing the water film thickness and can realize a dynamic and whole-area acquisition of runway wet surface condition information. This method can provide data support for intelligent decision making of landing safety under rainfall conditions.