iii. Recent studies have also confirmed the sensitivity of Continuous Friction Measuring Equipment (CFME) to water film thickness and other operational test conditions (Najafi et al. 2012).
iv. Speed is also a factor. Standards for locked-wheel friction measurements (SN, skid numbers) are set at 40 mph. Present vehicle operating speeds in Interstate and Primary Highways are much higher than this, while urban areas often have speed limits below.
v. Since both hot mix asphalt surface and tires are viscoelastic materials, temperature also affect their properties. Research has indicated that tire pavement friction decreases if the tire temperature increases (Hall et al. 2009). Although several researchers have investigated on this effect, this phenomenon is not still very well understood.
a. Jayawickrama and Thomas (1998) found that variation in skid numbers measurements can be as significant as 10 to 12 skid numbers from one day to another. These variations are due to changes in temperature and precipitation (Jayawickrama and Thomas 1998).
b. During summer months, skid resistance is lower than other times of the year. This effect can be either due to accumulation of polished particles from pavement which decrease the microtexture and macrotexture, or it can be contamination from vehicles such as oil and grease dripping. During the winter, winter maintenance practices, such as applying deicing salt, cause surface wear which expose new particle on aggregate surface and improves skid resistance. In spring, heavy rain flushes out the fine grit and makes the aggregate surface courser. Thecourse aggregate surface provides higher macrotexture and consequently higher skid resistance (Jayawickrama and Thomas 1998).
c. Colony (1992) also reported that fluctuation of friction trough out the year has the highest values in the winter and the lowest friction is experienced at the end of the summer (Colony 1992). Faung and Hughes (2007) detected that skid measurement on SUPERPAVE mixes, follow a cyclic pattern with the higher values in winter and low values in fall and summer (Faung and Hughes 2007).
d. Changes in temperature do not have a direct effect on the friction of pavement surface. However, they can affect the properties of the skid tester’s tire (Jayawickrama and Thomas 1998). As explained before, tire pavement friction is composed of adhesion and hysteresis. Adhesion is the shear force generated at the interface of the contact area and hysteresis is due to the damping losses in the tire rubber (Li et al. 2004). Higher temperature makes the tire more flexible. This reduces the energy loss of the tire (hysteresis) and decreases the measured skid number. Nevertheless there is no proof available for this mechanism in the literature. While some studies stated that the effect of temperature is a very insignificant; many others indicate that temperature is a significant factor (Jayawickrama and Thomas 1998).
e. Bazlamit and Reza (2005) indicated that regardless of the surface texture, increasing the temperature decreases the hysteresis component of surface friction while for adhesion component, surface texture affects this behavior (Bazlamit and Reza 2005). Since hysteresis accounts for greater part of total friction, the combined friction of the surface decreases with increasing temperature (Bazlamit and Reza 2005).
f. Hill and Henry (1982) proposed a model that predicts the seasonal variation in the skid number intercept (SN0). The analysis was based on the data collected on test sites in Pennsylvania from 1978 to 1980.