SIMULTANEOUS MEASUREMENT AND ANALYSIS OF NOISE LEVELS IN FLEXIBLE AND RIGID PAVEMENTS

Although concrete roads have been used worldwide for years, the same improvement could not exist in Turkey and therefore, bituminous (hot mix) asphalt roads were preferred instead. In this paper, the vastly built HMA (Hot Mix Asphalt) roads and rarely preferred concrete roads were compared based on their level of noise. For this purpose, the concrete road at the length of 2 kilometers between Afyonkarahisar and Emirdag; also the transition point to the HMA road (which continues after the concrete road) was observed. Both concrete and HMA road ends of this transition point was equipped with a noise measurement device and a camera was installed separately for providing minimum level of noise interference. Consequently, change in the noise levels depending on the building material of roads was recorded simultaneously. These factors was analysed and various models related to the sort of coating was provided. At this stage, the distance between set up points was kept as short as possible in order to prevent different results in the density of traffic and also in the flow rate. Result of various measurements and analysis provided the noise levels of concrete roads being 4 dB(A) less than HMA roads in the comparison based on the same level of vehicle composition and traffic flow. Encouraging the construction of concrete roads in our country is emphasized accordingly.