“More for less” or even “less for less” is the current mantra in the field of highways asset management.

Diminished budgets mean the entire highways management supply chain is now being challenged like never before. Best value, sustainability and innovation are being driven by austerity measures and pragmatic clients.

Total Bitumen identified these challenges some time ago, through market analysis and a need to innovate their product portfolio in response to the new commercial and technical challenges the industry was beginning to face.

Highways Asset Managers are tasked with maintaining the network above intervention level for skid resistance in an ever increasingly litigious society.

These economic drivers bring a trend towards premium surface dressings to restore performance in areas previously considered for a thin surfacing.

There is also a perception some thin surfacing applications aren’t lasting as long as originally anticipated, sometimes through misguided material design but also through inappropriate applications. These products can be enhanced or maintained through a planned surface treatment program throughout the materials life cycle.

A series of hard winters are stretching resources to breaking point and a scatter gun approach to pothole patching is no longer sustainable.

Rick Ashton, Total Bitumen’s Market Development Manager says, “A lot of the network is evolved construction rather than scientifically designed and the key to avoiding uncontrollable depreciation of the assets is intervention at key points in time.”

Surface dressing installed at key points throughout a pavements life cycle with diligence and correct design procedures can seal the surface, restore skid resistance, and inhibit the formation of potholes before more expensive deeper and obtrusive repair work is required.

Mr Ashton comments “It is the intervention level at the correct point which is critical.”

“This should be before structural failure as a planned preventative maintenance treatment not as a quick remedy to cover serious fatigue issues.”

“Simply allowing roads to disintegrate to reconstruction stage is like driving a car around without changing the oil occasionally – I would rather buy oil than engines!”

The implementation of Sector Scheme 13, RSTA Codes of Conduct, Road note 39 and most importantly trained competent personnel involved in the installation of the products are the real foundations of durable sustainable surface treatments

CE Marking by 2013 is the next step on the road to ensuring fitness for purpose of the systems.

Polymerisation of the binders used in the treatments has enhanced the systems performance dramatically in recent years and has significantly reduced the levels of premature failures in surface dressings.

Binder performance in traditional bitumous emulsion is limited by visco-elastic and thermoplastic properties. Adding polymers to the bitumen system significantly enhances the performance of these materials

Total Bitumen’s Emulsis range incorporates specific polymer levels and performance enhancing additives developed to answer the modern challenges the supply chain is now faced with.

The Emulsis range incorporates three performance levels tailored to specific applications and budgets.

Emulsis Ultra, Emulsis Satis & Emulsis Supreme.

Clients install the product best suited to their end use in terms of value engineering, site stresses, historical wear and previous failure modes, balancing unit cost against the expected life cycle.

The correct “horse for the course” is what underpins the range states Rick Ashton.

Emulsis behaves in a more elastic manner than traditional grade emulsions.
The polymer modification levels in the range give clear benefits in terms flexibility and resistance to extremes of temperature.

This makes the product less likely be brittle at low temperature or less likely to “black up” chippings at high ambient temperatures, reducing risk to the client and increasing safety for the travelling public.

Traditional site practice is to spray emulsions in the temperature range 80 - 90ºC.

This involves having to reheat the emulsion during the shift to maintain spraying temperature and achieve a satisfactory viscosity for adequate spread rates and aggregate wetting.

This reheating delays the surfacing operations increasing downtime as the surfacing crew wait for emulsion. Ultimately this affects how many m² of carriageway per shift a crew can surface dress.

Emulsis drops the working temperature range to 65ºC giving a greater working temperature window and potentially more m² surfaced per shift. A dressing season is brief - typically 90 days during the mid summer.

This saving in man hours can give substantial benefits to the contractor & client with typical time savings of 45 – 65 hours per tanker in a season.

Effectively an extra weeks surfacing added to a typical crew’s season.

Total Bitumen has produced models to demonstrate the typical savings in heating fuel and CO2 reduction possible with the Emulsis product range.

For more information
Rick Ashton MIAT - Market Development Manager
0771 445 2174
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www.bitumen.total.com