How Technology is Revolutionizing the Surfacing Industry

Modern road engineering has always focused on two things—providing a visual reference for vehicles travelling a path and ensuring the mechanical integrity of those vehicles. Today, though, the transportation industry is changing. Technology is innovating everything about surfacing, from the materials and construction methods used to the reasons we create roads in the first place. Keep reading to know more about the role of tech in this industry.

Reducing the Environmental Footprint of Roads

The cement industry contributes eight percent of annual global carbon dioxide emissions, which is not surprising since concrete is the second most widely-used material in the world after water. Reducing carbon emissions is a primary goal for engineers and technicians; manufacturers are constantly researching ways to make these materials more environmentally friendly.

Australia is one of the countries contributing to research in the reduction of emissions in surfacing technology. In particular, Australia has led the way in the application of geopolymer concrete, which contributes little to no CO2 emissions.

According to the Australian think tank Beyond Zero Emissions, pavements and roads in Victoria, including parts of the Westgate Freeway, are now made of geopolymer concrete. In the future, hopefully, more states and areas will follow suit.

Reducing Noise Pollution on the Road

Noise pollution contributes significantly to stress of those who have to listen to it. It leads to increased heart rates and blood pressure, and it can also affect people’s concentration. Road noise can also bring property prices and values down.

Reducing noise pollution, even by just three decibels, can make a world of difference. In Australia-based trial runs of noise-reducing hot-mix asphalt, researchers found that traffic noise levels went down by as much as 35 percent.

This reduction is because this type of asphalt uses crumb rubber and modified polymer binders. Polymers make the material more porous, helping it absorb sound.

Roads as a Source of Electricity

In an exciting move, innovative product designers are considering streets as a potential component in creating complex energy grids. Australia has the world’s ninth-largest road network—it has 356,000 kilometres of paved roads, and the country’s Highway 1 is the world’s longest national highway.

These thousands of kilometres of road surface can be used to harness the sun’s energy and researchers and technicians are looking into creating electricity-generating solar panels for roads.

Sprayed Seals for High-Traffic Roads

Roads carry several thousand vehicles in a day. In Australia, there were 20.1 million registered motor vehicles as of January 2021, a 1.7 percent increase from the previous year. The country’s road system has approximately 810,000 kilometres of roads, and 330,000 kilometres of these have sprayed seals.

Sprayed seals are thin layers of bitumen and aggregate sprayed on pavements and road surfaces. This surface treatment is necessary for countries like Australia and New Zealand, and sparsely populated countries with large distances between cities and population centres.

KEE leads the way in spray sealing technology; our spray seal team is equipped with the first two Specialist Roading Equipment (SRE) telescoping sprayers in Western Australia. These sprayers have variable spray bars, enabling multiple application rates in a single run. This feature makes it easier for engineers to seal wheel paths and shoulders.

Conclusion

The surfacing industry is changing because of technological innovations. From reducing noise pollution and carbon emissions to ensuring the longevity of surfacing and roads, engineers and scientists keep devising new, efficient, and convenient methods of moving from Point A to Point B.

Every major road project in Perth has had KEE Surfacing as one of its partners. Our surfacing and construction hire workforce consists of bitumen and asphalt laying professionals, hand-picked for their skills, experience, and knowledge in delivering safe yet cutting-edge techniques. Contact us today for enquiries!

The world is quickly transforming and developing, and with that, heavy machinery and equipment need to keep up with the changes. With all these advancements in electromobility, machinery, and telematics, there’s no denying that this will change the game in the construction industry, providing many benefits to companies and clients worldwide.

Many are aware of the technological advancements in the digital space, but our physical infrastructure and construction developments deserve the spotlight, too, and for a good reason.

Since the machinery hire industry will continue to grow along with tech progress, it’s only right to explore the different technology trends pushing innovation in the heavy plant machinery space. Let’s take a look!

Trend #1: The Rise of Autonomous Machinery

By the end of 2025, the self-driving vehicle market is expected to be worth about USD1.6 billion. With this growth, you’ll find an overwhelming change in the industry’s productivity and efficiency, making autonomous machinery an unbeatable trend.

When a company integrates autonomous vehicles, workflows will improve, allowing these technologies to complete mundane tasks. This will allow employees to focus on value-added jobs instead of day-to-day issues that could take up too much of their time.

With that said, autonomous vehicles can also help improve the well-being of employees, since it promotes stress relief and safety in the work area.

Trend #2: Pushing Electromobility to Benefit the Environment

Another innovation to note is that, since autonomous vehicles are on the rise, the advanced equipment will be powered by electric motors, which provides sustainability for businesses.

With electromobility, equipment manufacturers have addressed years of sustainability efforts, finally realising lower-emission solutions, such as reduced fuel consumption and the development of telematics systems, which decrease fuel usage and idle time.

Continued research and development allow manufacturers to produce electric motors with batteries and computers integrated into machinery to help them work efficiently. Since this knowledge is shared across industries, electric motors have become more accessible, cheaper, and easier to make without compromising their powerful benefits.

But besides sustainability, electromobility also requires less maintenance than traditional motors, allowing companies to cut down expenses. Not to mention, with fast-charging options, these vehicles can reach peak charge within a small window.

Trend #3: Digitally Connected Machines, Telematics, and Virtual Change

We all know that we’re living in the digital age where almost everything is digitised. With that said, there’s no denying that the heavy plant machinery space has also found unexpected growth in this landscape.

Hundreds of multiple construction companies are beginning to embrace connected construction equipment and telematics. Because of this, it’s starting to become the norm at job sites, which encourages more innovation in this field.

By connecting equipment through telematics systems, you can merge GPS technology and onboard diagnostics, monitoring sensors, reports, and logs to help streamline and improve the performance and operations of construction equipment.

With all of this, telematics systems serve as a singular hub where data and information can be accessed, bringing in improvements in productivity and service.

The Bottom Line: There are No Stopping Technological Innovations in the Heavy Plant Machinery Industry

While it may take some time for most machinery tech innovations to become a norm, it’s quite encouraging to see that many industries are slowly adapting to the change and incorporating the different technological advancements we mentioned above.

Once advanced equipment becomes the norm, the construction industry will continue to rise, boosting economic growth, and ultimately benefiting society.

How Can We Help You?

If you’re looking to integrate advanced equipment into your projects, it’s best to call KEE Group.

KEE Group is Australia’s most effective and unique civil and mining support service, providing hires, surfacing, transport, and fuel services for any development project. Looking for machinery hire in Albany? Get in touch with us today!

IMAGE © Forbes

While scrap heaps containing millions of wasted tyres might not seem like a hazard to anyone, they actually can cause severe damage to the environment. Such was the case in 1999 when a lightning storm ignited tyres in a Californian tyre recycling facility. The “Westly Tyre Fire” created an enormous fire and brought to attention the dangers of rubber scrap heaps, and as such, efforts were placed to find a use for scrap tyres.

Today, many companies have focused on putting old rubber tyres to use, one of the most prominent being recycling them for road surfacing. whereby rubber is combined with pavement materials to create the roads we know today. While not all roads do this, a significant proportion does.

That being said, let’s talk more about surface trends of 2021 and beyond to see what we can expect from the use of surfaces and rubber:

Surface Trends Beyond 2021

Many roads today are made of what is known as asphalt concrete. This type of material is made up of rocky aggregates and a black binder that acts as the glue to keep the road together. It is in these binders that utilizes a blend of complex hydrocarbons from petroleum that has a significant impact on the environment despite how little it is used. This doesn’t include the process of acquiring, transporting, and refining the binder, all of which emit large amounts of greenhouse gases. Even during the paving process, more greenhouse gases are produced as the binders need to be heated with a mix of aggregate. Unfortunately, such a binder doesn’t last too long, either. Over time, the binder stiffens, leading to cracks.

With that in mind, how does one go about fixing the problem of an environmentally harmful binder that quickly oxidizes and causes the road to crack? This is where tyres come in.

Tyres are made out of synthetic and natural rubbers which are heated up with various auxiliary compounds to create a cross-linked structure. This composition is what makes the tyres so hardy, and that’s why they last so long in landfills. Fortunately, though, they do not have to stay there. Upon discovering ways to turn tyres into crumb rubber, the addition of such rubber into asphalt binders has improved the surface’s performance significantly. However, there is one drawback here. The drawback of mixing rubber with asphalt is that the temperatures needed to make the mixture viscous enough to work with, need to be much higher. Fortunately, warm mix technologies that utilize foam water have allowed such temperatures to drop by a whopping 40 Celcius, leading to less energy spent and, as a result, much less greenhouse gas produced. That said, further research is progressing to create cold mixtures, but they’re still used as patching material rather than all-out road solutions because their performance isn’t up there.

Conclusion

Apart from mixing crumb rubber with binders to improve the performance and environmental-friendliness of roads, many other experimental trends are being generated to take it much further. One idea is to use Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP), using old roads to build new ones. However, while many of these implementations are still in their infancy, it is good to see companies looking for new materials.

Seeing how manufacturers are working hard to find more environmentally-friendly solutions that do not sacrifice performance, one can assume that the world is only thanking us in our attempt to live greener. With that in mind, we believe that the future trends will revolve around being environmentally friendly, and these apply to roads and more. KEE Surfacing has been using both crumb rubber and RAP over many years and is proud to lead the way for WA’s roads to be built using more environmentally friendly materials. With KEE Asphalt, KEE Profiling, KEE Spray Seal and KEE Basecourse Paving divisions, KEE Surfacing has you covered!

KEE Group is Australia’s civil and mining support service, offering services covering hire, surfacing, transport, and fuel. If you are looking for a construction hire that offers surfacing services that you can rely on, contact us today!

IMAGE © Katharyn Quinn 2021