Determination of tire rubber-pavement directional coefficient of friction based on contact mechanism considerations

A common shortcoming of the conventional approaches of calculating pavement coefficient of friction (COF) from pavement texture data is that they fail to recognize the directionality of pavement texture and COF. The present study considered a directional tire-pavement contact mechanism to correctly calculate directional COFs of pavements. The proposed approach considered the directional characteristics of pavement texture found in practically all in-service pavements. The concept of topographic prominence was employed to identify those texture peaks that would be in contact with tire rubber, and their directional contributions to tire rubber-pavement sliding friction. The calculated directional COFs were validated with experimentally measured values.