Fast single layer asphalt resurfacing of a busy rural road

As part of their plans to continuously improve their highways maintenance activities, Wakefield MDC approached Tarmac, one of their key supply chain partners, to investigate new paving materials. By using high performance asphalts and increasing standardisation of materials across their Highways Maintenance teams, they hoped to improve the quality and consistency of resurfacing work. This in turn would help to reduce failure, extend pavement life and decrease long-term highway maintenance costs.

The council worked with technical representatives from Tarmac to look at a number of different materials, including ULTIFASTPAVE, a 14 mm dense continuously graded asphalt using a 40/60 pen binder, designed to be laid in a single layer at up to 75mm thick. The new material would need to provide good workability and compaction and be self regulating to cope with underlying pavement conditions. It would also need to avoid coarse aggregate segregation that had previously occurred in alternative HRA materials when raked by hand. The plan was to conduct trials to compare the performance of ULTIFASTPAVE against the existing material used, a 55% Type C hot rolled asphalt.

Initial trials by two separate surfacing gangs using Tarmac ULTIFASTPAVE delivered an excellent finish with minimal segregation and hit all of the performance criteria set by the Council. Both laying teams reported on how well the material performed on site and said they would be keen to use the material again in the future. The client was impressed with the results and were considering using ULTIFASTPAVE as their default surfacing material. “Using this new innovative product, has resulted in major improvements in quality, productivity and meterage gained per tonne as well as environmental performance” Craig Pritchard - Highways Resource Team Lead.