Many
State Department of Transportations (DOT) are looking for more cost effective
pavement materials without compromising the quality of the pavement life-cycle,
as well as extending the life-cycle of the pavement. State DOTs look at testing
to determine if pavement materials meet the criteria to be approved for usage
in their roadways. The National Center for Asphalt Technology (NCAT) researches
asphalt products in areas of structural design, construction methods, materials
and testing, performance, pavement preservation, pavement rehabilitation and
highway safety.
In
July of 2012, NCAT conducted a field study on accelerated performance testing
(APT) and FORTA-FI® which was placed on section E9B-1. The NCAT
testing track sponsored a two-year cycle where trafficking was applied by using
a fleet of heavily loaded tractor-trailer rigs to provide the equivalent of 10
million; 18,000-pound single-axle loads (EASLs). NCAT also applied a design
lifetime of truck traffic averaging ten to fifteen years within the two-year
period.
Each
rig in the five-truck fleet ran an average of 680 miles per day in order to
achieve a real world traffic simulation. During the trafficking phase,
performance of the test sections were studied and FORTA-FI® has passed with
flying colors. Stay tuned as the Alabama DOT is planning on leaving FORTA®’s
test section in place for another 10 million EASLs to further study the
benefits of utilizing FORTA-FI® in the asphalt mix.
