Life nereide: Innovative monitoring activities on implementation urban sites

The LIFE NEREiDE project wants to demonstrate the use of new porous asphalt pavements and low noise surfaces composed by recycled asphalt pavements and crumb rubber from scrap tires, achieving specific benefits on resource efficiency and noise pollution. In particular, it wants to achieve better acoustical, allowing a significant reduction of noise in urban areas and health improvement. The new pavements will be laid in two urban areas in Tuscany, and will be tested with innovative instrumentation. The selection of urban areas has been performed and the procedure will be described in this paper. The effectiveness of the new pavements will be evaluated by measurements of surface characteristics, acoustical properties and by surveys submitted to the exposed population. The criterion used to evaluate the effectiveness is based on a before-after evaluation of the surfaces acoustical properties as well as the comparison with other traditional porous asphalt pavements. Thus, a side objective is to develop new techniques to monitor performances of new pavements in order to improve the reliability of the results. Differences between performances of surfaces must be evaluated on site with techniques able to rate them also in urban context, in this paper specific challenges will be described. In fact, to monitor performances, the CPX and the pass-by method will be used to measure the noise produced by tires rolling on the reference pavements and on the innovative ones. The pass-by will be adapted to the urban reality, minimizing the confounding factors. New evaluation methods of sound absorption will be developed and validated, allowing a better reliability of monitoring results, helping the choice between new asphalts with better performances. Guidelines on monitoring activities will be developed in order to upgrade and to improve the methods currently available to assess the effectiveness of low noise road surfaces in urban areas.