The university is going to build two short pieces of road to the future.

The roads will be part of the new Advanced Transportation Infrastructure Research Center to be developed on UC property near the University Airport west of Highway 113. Phase 1 includes the test roads and two temporary trailers for offices, and site work for the rest of the site. The cost is an estimated $3.5 million, with $3.1 million coming from the California Department of Transportation and the rest from campus sources.

The 300-foot-long and 1,000-foot-long roads will be used for two kinds of research: one to look for more durable pavement, the other to develop better highway construction and maintenance methods and equipment.

Professor Steve Velinsky of the Department of Mechanical and Aeronau-tical Engineering does research on the construction and maintenance side: "One emphasis of this work is trying to infuse new technologies to make highways safer for the men and women who do road work, and for the traveling public."

The center will bring together two existing UC research programs:

• Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology — Velinsky and Professor Bahram Ravani are co-directors of this program, established at UC Davis in 1991 and responsible for such innovations as automated systems for putting down traffic cones and picking them up; and combination GPS and radar systems to guide snowplow drivers in whiteout conditions.
• Pavement Research Center — Director John Harvey said existing labs and equipment will be moved in stages from UC Berkeley's Richmond Field Station to the new Davis site.

Harvey himself moved from the Berkeley faculty to the Davis faculty in 2002 — he is a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering — and has been anticipating the Pavement Research Center's move.

Ten UC Davis graduate students regularly visit the existing pavement center to do research, as there are no comparable facilities at UC Davis.

The Richmond facilities, some more than 50 years old, are "functional but inefficient," according to the environmental report for the Davis replacement project.

"Several of the facilities are exposed to the elements, such as the concrete mixing area and the asphalt rolling area, making it difficult to control specimen preparation temperatures," the environmental document states.

Harvey said the Pavement Research Center has carried out about $5 million worth of research annually for Caltrans in the last four years.

Simulators

As designed, the new pavement research road will be 300 feet long by 35 feet wide. Pavement of various compositions will be put down, and heavy vehicle simulators — with test wheels — will then be put in place to test the pavement materials and engineering.

Caltrans owns two simulators, and the Pavement Research Center runs both of them. They are 80 feet long and weigh 65 tons each.

Researchers can adjust the load that the test wheels are carrying, and, consequently, how much pressure they are putting on the pavement. Researchers also can make adjustments for temperature and precipitation, to see how pavement holds up in various conditions.

The simulator wheels go over the pavement again and again and again, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, always with someone monitoring the operation. Within a two- to three-month period, Harvey said, researchers can replicate 20 years of highway use and deterioration.

Implementation is key

Harvey said he looks forward to the research center's move to Davis: "We have several important projects that are ready to begin testing." One of them, he said, involves maintenance treatments to make pavement last longer.

With the new center closer to Caltrans headquarters in Sacramento, he expects to see more officials checking in on the pavement lab in person. Harvey welcomes the interaction.

Seeing the research, he said, "helps them understand it and move it forward to implementation."

Without implementation, he said, there are no cost savings — and that is the whole idea behind the research center, to develop materials and methods that save the state money.

Highway maintenance

The second piece of test road at the Davis center will be 1,000 feet long by 30 feet wide, in an L shape with circles at both ends for turning. Test vehicles will travel 30 mph or less.

A closed course like this will be an alternative to country roads around Davis. "Clearly we want to test our machines and tweak them," Velinsky said, "without having to worry about getting run over by traffic."

His Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology Research Center has carried out, on average, more than $2.5 million worth of research annually for the past 10 years, sponsored by Caltrans and the transportation departments in other states, as well as the Federal Highway Administration and the National Science Foundation.

Professors Velinsky and Ravani, five research engineers, four staff members and 10 graduate students now work on some machinery projects in Walker Hall; for projects that are too big for the campus core, the research center rents space off-campus.

Shops and labs would be consolidated at the new center in Phase 2, at a construction cost of about $1 million. This funding is not yet in place — and Harvey said private fundraising is planned.

Harvey said he looks forward to collaborating with other campus units on highway-related research, such as drainage and related environmental problems.