Airport Pavement Technology

This has created the need for more roads and importantly raised the demand on airports while at the same time increasing maintenance demand on existing ones. As a result, the environment as well as cost consciousness has become most important issues, since roads and airports generally require large capital investment, raw materials and landscapes.

Road and Runway Pavements

The surface sections of roads and runways are known as "pavements". The two most common types of pavements are concrete and asphalt. To serve its purpose, a pavement must have adequate load-carrying capability, good rideability and must allow safe operation of vehicles on roads and aircraft on air traffic areas.

(Marc Stet) As with any physical structure after certain usage over time, pavements begin to wear and their physical properties alter.

This alteration is normally evidenced in the appearance of various types of surface distress caused by a combination of environmental conditions, vehicle/aircraft loadings, mix design, materials and construction workmanship (TRANSPORT CANADA, Civil Aviation, 12/04/05).

This causes the pavement not to function as designed and results in safety hazards to its users if not repaired and maintained as alterations can become severe. This occurs whether on a Heathrow runway or on a European Highway. One major alteration of its physical properties is the reduction in roughness leading to reduced skid resistance. Good roughness is based on several important characteristics of the road surface and the more frequent ones are (HOSKING, 1992):

1. Adequate micro-texture.
2. Aood macro-texture of the surface, which is required to maintain skidding resistance at higher speeds.
3. Adequate drainage of the water from the pavement.

Macro and Micro texture are major factors surrounding the friction value of a pavement and insufficient amounts of these two can result in reduced friction values. Each however serves different purposes and is discussed in more detail in Pavement Texture and Maintenance

Runway Pavement Maintenance

Timely maintenance of pavements will lead to maintenance of adequate frictional value, increased pavement lifespan and has an effect on the safety of the user. There are two types of pavement maintenance known: Structural and Operational maintenance. Each of these two types has a different functionality and as such contributes differently to the attributes of pavements. From this, different methods have been devised to retexture pavements.

This paper looks at the importance and reasons for retexturing pavements and the different practices currently employed for pavement retexturing. Advantages and disadvantages are considered for each method. A comparative analysis is done taking into account critical factors such as method, cost, effectiveness and added lifespan to pavement. The TrackJet technology, which is most widely used by major airports in Europe, is also looked at, taking into account its technical properties and case studies to date.