Maverick Engineering Social Media

Stefan Romanoschi, P.E. – High On-the-road Performance

As public awareness of the deteriorating condition of America’s highways and bridges grows, more attention is being paid to methods to restore or replace existing infrastructure. One of those most concerned with pavements for highways, roads and airfields is Civil Engineering Associate Professor Stefan Romanoschi.

Dr. Romanoschi came to UT Arlington in the fall of 2007 after being an associate professor at Kansas State University. He holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from the Gheorghe Asachi Technical University in Iassy, Romania, and master’s degrees in civil engineering and applied statistics and a Ph.D., all from Louisiana State University.

Dr. Romanoschi’s specialty is pavement structures and the materials beneath them. This includes soil stabilization, pavement design, pavement materials characterization and pavement management systems. He has extensive experience in these areas, gained during research while earning his degrees at LSU, teaching at Kansas State University and being a consultant for the Kansas Department of Transportation, the New York State Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration. Dr. Romanoschi has been the principal investigator on projects valued at more than $2,000,000.

Several of his articles have been published in the Transportation Research Board’s journal, Transportation Research Record, and in the proceedings of several international conferences on pavement related topics. Dr. Romanoschi is a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Highway Pavements Committee and of the Transportation Research Board’s Full-scale and Accelerated Pavement Testing Committee. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in Louisiana and Texas.

One of Dr. Romanoschi’s favorite areas of study is accelerated pavement testing, where sample sections of a proposed roadway design are subjected to intense trials by a special, 80-foot-long machine that moves a typical truck axle set back and forth over the pavement section, sometimes as much as 100,000 times in a week. At this rate, the damage induced by the machine in one month is about the same as that done by real traffic in 10 years or more. The machine is portable, so tests can be performed at different locations and under different temperature conditions.

Dr. Romanoschi designed and outfitted one of these machines while at Kansas State University and used it for several projects, studying different factors. For example, these might include the effects of truck axles using one “super single” tire versus two regular tires; or pavements consisting of various mixtures of aggregates, recyclable materials, binders, stabilizers and catalysts; whether the asphalt is applied as a “hot” mix or a “warm” mix, or the increased incidence of overloaded trucks and trailers. The latter are becoming more important to Texas transportation officials as many overloaded vehicles enter the U.S. from Mexico, where heavier loads are permitted.

In addition to highway traffic, the machine can be outfitted with aircraft tires to test the effects of airplanes landing on a runway.

There are only a few of these machines in the U.S.; Dr. Romanoschi wants to build one incorporating his improved designs. He is currently locating funding and would like to begin sometime next year. He is also preparing to introduce and teach two new graduate-level pavement design courses in the spring.

And, if these weren’t enough to keep him busy, Dr. Romanoschi is involved in a New York State project to calibrate the national performance models for the design of flexible and rigid pavements to local conditions in New York.