A SOLUTION TO REPAIR DAMAGED ROADS EFFECTIVELY INNOVATION IN ROAD INFRASTRUCTURE (Paper 817)

The present invention relates to road surfacing materials and in particular their use in repairing holes in damaged roads.
Throughout this specification, the word road is intended to include paths, runways, driveways and any other similar hard topped surface.
Many road surfaces are covered with bitumen or concrete to provide a hard surface. Over time these surfaces may be damaged, leading to spalling of the surface, ‘pot-holes’ and cracking. Tra-ditionally, road surfaces have been repaired by cleaning the damaged area and applying bitumen or concrete to the damaged part to provide a flat load bearing surface again. However there are drawbacks to both these repair methods.
Bitumen based material is prepared off-site where the bitumen is heated to a high temperature and then mixed with aggregate etc. The mixed material is then poured into silicon lined bags and allowed to cool into solid blocks. There are drawbacks with this method of repair. The repaired section is not as strongly adhered to the base material as an undamaged portion of road is. There-fore, it is prone to deteriorate again. Furthermore, the cost of manufacturing the bitumen blocks and subsequently having to heat them on site to a high temperature (around 200° C.) makes it expensive.
Another alternative repair material is concrete. This is usually transported to site in a pre-mixed form which requires it to be used fairly quickly. This makes it inconvenient to use. Concrete re-pairs suffer from similar problems to bitumen in that the repaired section generally deteriorates faster than the unrepaired sections and thus requiring further repair. Generally when concrete de-velops pot holes or severe cracking the whole concrete bay is removed to the foundation and re-placed with new concrete. The process is expensive and time consuming causing the road to be closed for several days.This can be of great importance when repairing busy motorways or run-ways where a long period during which the road or runway is unusable and cannot be reopened to traffic is unacceptable.