All about asphalts for roads and other paved areas – Jeff Farrington
- Course focuses on asphalt for highways, consultants, contractors, and LA staff.
- Covers asphalt production, storage, modified bitumens, and recycled asphalt.
- Teaches selection of optimal asphalts for various road layers.
- Addresses durable asphalt overlays, tar in existing roads, and SUDS usage.
- Emphasizes good practices for laying, compaction, and maintenance.
Overview
The Asphalt Training course focuses on educating consultants, term maintenance contractors, and LA staff on various aspects of asphalt for highways and paved areas. The course covers topics such as asphalt production, storage, transport, selection of optimum asphalts, durable overlays, dealing with tar in roads, and proper laying and compaction techniques. Participants will learn to select the right asphalts for different pavement layers, understand the importance of modified bitumens, and recognize good and bad site practices to ensure the longevity of asphalt pavements.
Who should attend
Consultants, Term Maintenance Contractors, LA Staffs
All about asphalts for highways and other paved areas, a course for consultants, term maintenance contractors and LA staffs
Course content
- Asphalt production, how it is made and what can go wrong
- Storage and transport, how they can both affect the durability of asphalt
- Where modified bitumens really are necessary
- Where recycled asphalt is really useful and when it should be avoided
- “Warm” and “cold” asphalts, what are they and are they as good as hot asphalt?
- Selection of optimum asphalts for use in all layers in both “designed” and “evolved” roads
- Durable asphalt overlays to concrete
- Dealing with tar in existing roads at minimum cost
- Use of asphalt in SUDS
- Laying and compaction, how bad practices can drastically shorten the life of new asphalt
Course overview
There is a bewildering array of asphalts in the BSEN 13108 specification series, which superseded our old British Standards, but all but one have characteristics which make them entirely suitable for specific uses. Binder course materials can be equally confusing as can base asphalts but all need to be understood to ensure roads and other pavements are built and maintained in the most cost effective manner.
We also have proprietary asphalts, many with modified bitumens sometimes recommended in areas where they are quite unnecessary but how would you know? Equally, how would you know where they are necessary and should be used?
Roads can have vastly differing traffic and axle loadings, design speeds and sub-soil conditions. Some have been designed to recognised standards others have evolved from mediaeval lanes, drove roads and Georgian and Victorian housing streets and there was no such thing as bitumen road base until the 1960’s..
Deeper repairs often simply replace one construction with the same again and we wonder why the new one needs attention again in just a few years. Reflective cracking of quite new asphalt on concrete roads and even on reinstated asphalt roads can be avoided for many years if we use existing materials correctly.
This short course enables delegates to select the optimum asphalts and treatments for pavement layers in both “evolved” and “designed” roads, including evolved roads with virtually no asphalt content.. It also looks at modified bitumens and explains where they are vital for the asphalt’s in-service performance and durability.
Asphalt production methods, production problems affecting the durability of mixtures, their hot-bin storage, which does not always safeguard their durability, and their transporting to paving sites are also examined. Recycling asphalt is here to stay but it is not always beneficial. Sometimes it is not good for inclusion in new mixes but how can you tell, and what good use can be made of it?
Both in transit and once on site, it is all too easy to ruin perfectly good asphalt and lives ranging from 6 months to 15 years for ostensibly the same asphalts are not unknown, with many failing to last even 5 years. The course deals with good and bad site practices, including poor preparation work etc so that even casual observers can spot potential problems and perhaps even understand why they had failures in the past. The course also provides outline guidance on sampling and testing both to deal with problems and for routine quality checks..
It also covers less common asphalt usage for instance in SUDS and areas in where loaded articulated lorry trailers and containers are stacked.
Many failing roads have tar-bound layers which are extremely expensive to remove in an environmentally acceptable manner but learn how to re-use them beneficially avoid these disposal costs and how simple and inexpensive maintenance treatments can prolong the lives of bituminous pavement layers for decades.
The lecturer is a self-confessed asphalt anorak and offers free, non-legal, e-mail asphalt advice to course delegates for the ensuing two years.
Duration:1 Day
Cost:£275 + VAT
Asphalt Training Scotland, Inverness, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dunfermline and other sites throughout the UK including onsite closed company courses are available.
