Exton co. rolls out new way to test roads
ARRB, started in Australia, now has U.S. headquarters in Eagleview; its loaded tractor trailers let clients know how their roads are doing
UPPER UWCHLAN » An area company with deep Australian roots is putting new meaning into the phrase, “where the rubber meets the road.”
ARRB Group Inc., which opened its first U.S. office in the Exton area in 2015, uses advanced technology packed into a tractor trailer to give clients a beneath-the-surface view of the quality of their roadways.
Its customers are state transportation departments, municipalities that have road systems to maintain and federal governments.
Chad Murnane, chief operating officer of ARRB, said road surfaces can be misleading. Some that look cracked and crumbled are fine underneath and just need resurfacing, while others look fine but need replacing because of structural weakness.
ARRB employees last week were studying roads in Colorado and in Mississippi and Louisiana, Murnane said, adding that the company uses a smaller van for some jobs.
“We just finished a big project in Virginia – four-and-ahalf thousand miles of primary roads,” said Murnane, 40, a native of Australia who moved to the Downingtown area to start the American operation almost two years ago. “We found some that needed attention. The more data you have the better decisions you can make.”
While relatively new to the United States – ARRB has one truck here, two in Australia and has sold several more in South Africa, China and Germany – it has been collecting data for more than 50 years. It is particularly big in Australia, where the government developed the technology, and in New Zealand, Murnane said.
ARRB Group originally began as the “Australian Road Research Board.” As it progressed along its path in the business world, it eventually was more commonly known as ARRB Group, which is the name and logo it uses today.
The U.S. company, which was spun off of the government operation, continues to draw on expertise of the Australian headquarters. Based in Melbourne, ARRB has five of
fices across Australia’s capital cities.
“I used to work for the Australian government, now it’s a private company,” said Murnane, who worked for ARRB in Australia for 10 years, starting in Perth before moving to Brisbane and Sydney.
The company wanted to be on the East Coast of the U.S. and Pennsylvania was aggressive in recruiting it, Murnane said in explaining how ARRB ended up being based in the Eagleview mixed use development off of Route 100 near the Downingtown interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The location gives it good access to New Jersey, New York, Virginia and many larger U.S. markets, he said, adding the Chester County Economic Development office was helpful in finding a place for the U.S. headquarters.
“Chester County is more pro-active than most,” he said.
Locally, the company did a study of some roads for Uwchlan, which wanted a base line of their conditions before Sunoco put in its Mariner East 2 pipeline through the township. “They will have before and after data,” Murnane said.
Since 2013, ARRB has studied over 150,000 miles of road using its Intelligent Pavement Assessment Vehicle, or iPAVe, technology. The company says the information it provides saves its customers money by showing the areas that need the most attention and those that are structurally sound beneath the surface.
The tractor-trailer data collection vehicle uses Doppler lasers to monitor the response of a pavement to the application of a rolling load at highway speeds. The iPAVe collects, at traffic speed. Another big plus of the technology is roads don’t have to be closed while they’re being studied.
iPAVe data provides continuous pavement deflection profiles, from which bearing capacity can be derived and pavement fatigue can be estimated. The high accuracy and resolution of the iPAVe data enables engineers to pinpoint areas where the pavement structure may be subject to failure, providing an additional dimension for pavement evaluation, Murnane explained.
Each truck costs $4 million to put on the road. A top-of-the-line Volvo, it is able to brake itself automatically and Murnane believes the company will have driverless vehicles “sometime in the near future.”
ARRB has five employees now working from the Exton location but expects that number will double next year and will grow to 30 to 50 relatively soon after that.
“In the next five years, I would expect four or five of these to be running (in the United States) because it saves quite a bit of money,” Murnane said. “This is a new way of looking at pavement management.”