Additives & Emulsions

With the increase in polymer-modified asphalts (PMAs) in our industry comes the need to blend polymers into product efficiently. The team at Heatec, an Astec Industries company, Chattanooga, Tennessee, has built the Polymer-blending skid to facilitate the process and offer return for additional blending. Here’s how it works. While the process is “quick” enough that […]

What was old has become new again as an N.B. West crew foam-recycled Missouri State Route AT in Franklin County—better known as Old U.S. Route 66—as part of a resurfacing project. U.S. 66 is the storied “Mother Road” from Chicago to Los Angeles and is often remembered as a dual-lane highway. Before that it was […]

Finding the right materials for statewide use is a monumental task when you have an area as big as Texas. State materials engineers for the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) are charged with finding ways to increase the amount of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) used in asphalt pavement mixes, and lengthen the life of pavements […]

Savvy asphalt producers and terminal owners keep an eye on the liquid market all around the globe. The ups and downs seen in South Africa and China in the past year(s) aren’t the only indicators of economic growth spurts overseas. To illustrate the marketplace in India specifically, the following excerpt is from the Bitumart Annual […]

Let me begin this exposition on the asphalt industry’s use of asphalt cement (AC) and additives in environmentally positive configurations with a diversion. This diversion is toward the fantastic. Picture, if you will, a wasteland in which the missing windows of high rise buildings mimic broken teeth. Along litter-cluttered sidewalks, vines escape their cracked pots […]

When Phil Foley moved from Maine to Buda, Texas, 1.5 years ago to work for Austin Materials and Industrial Asphalt and Aggregates as their VP of operations, he already knew a thing or two about spray paving. In fact, he’d even worked with a 1986 Midland spray paver, “one of the original spray pavers.” Spray […]

You may have heard of a new asphalt binder parameter for evaluating age-related cracking potential. Pronounced delta tea see, it’s spelled out ΔTc. It’s defined as the numerical difference between the low continuous grade temperature determined from the Bending Beam Rheometer (BBR) stiffness criteria (which is the temperature at which stiffness, S, equals 300 MPa) […]