Pothole Free Roads Are Possible According to Professor Pavement

Can you imagine driving on smooth roads in Greater Sudbury?  It could be a reality one day as I read in a story that appears in Sudbury.com.

The idea of prolonging pavement came to Abd El Halim, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa back in 1982 when he was in graduate school at the University of Waterloo.

At the time, he was working on developing the technology of ‘Polymer Grid Reinforced Asphalt pavements.’  His plan was to prevent the cracking of the surface which can happen less than two years after an area is re-paved.  The professor realized that when roads crack, water gets inside and with our colder climate can freeze and thaw which then causes potholes. . However, as he was completing his PhD on the topic, he discovered the main cause of the surface cracks … these very fine surface cracks were created by steel drum-rollers, vibratory, static or oscillating rollers. It was thought that process would prevent those cracks but they don’t.

The result was the inception of the AMIR (Asphalt Multi-Integrated Roller and his son’s name).  The steel drums are replaced with a track made of a specially designed rubber belt. No vibrations or oscillations are needed.  The machine completes the compaction of the asphalt in fewer passes [than the current process] and provides highway engineers and designers with pavement that lasts longer with less maintenance and repairs.”  Simply put when you compact pavement the traditional way there are cracks as you see below.

Using the AMIR technology…there are no visible cracks.

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A full scale prototype was made in the early 1990s by a Canadian manufacturer of tunnel-boring machines and later acquired by Caterpillar Inc. An Australian version, dubbed HIPAC, was produced in the late 1990s. The Canadian AMIR project was shelved because of the lack of funding for it but in 2012. the Ontario Ministry of Transportation took an interest in the process and signed a deal with Carleton University and R.W. Tomlinson Limited, an Ottawa-based firm, to upgrade the Canadian prototype.  They did work on a road in Ottawa in 2014 and the results were positive. The goal is to create roads that last 20 years with only minor maintenance.   “With current rollers, you’re lucky if you get seven years,” Halim said. “You can see that in any city.”