(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] When you think roads, you think pavement,
but constructing long-lasting roadways
is more than just the quality of the pavement layer.
The base layers below the pavement
are also critical to the performance
and lifespan of a roadway.
Typically, an additive such as cement
is used to stabilize base materials,
but determining the correct amount of cement
needed to meet strength requirements
can be a lengthy process.
The Texas Department of Transportation
and researchers with the Texas A&M Transportation Institute
are looking at ways to accelerate
the design procedure for base materials.
- TxDOT uses cement treatment as their most common method
of improving the quality of base materials.
Now, to do that, you need to know how much cement to add.
And so, there's test methods
that determine the rate of cement to use,
and typically, those methods require
one week to get a strength value.
And this project was about
getting that strength value faster
and with less effort than the current method
to basically streamline the test procedure
to decide how much cement should be added.
- Well, we're taking the mix design procedure
and making it faster.
We're taking a procedure that could be somewhat convoluted,
making it simpler, becoming more efficient,
and overall, easier for people to understand,
comprehend, and actually run themselves.
- We partnered with TxDOT districts
to identify actual projects
that were being set up for cement treatment,
and we sampled those actual real-world project materials,
brought those materials back to the lab,
and then we ran the current methods
along with the research methods concurrently.
And that way we're able to both fulfill the research need
and also provide information suitable
for use on these actual real-world construction projects.
- I would say the key finding is reducing the curing time
from seven days to three days,
but we also went to a different molding procedure.
We're using less material.
So now, in the field, we don't have
to sample four or 500 pounds of material.
We can break that down, possibly down to 200.
- So for TxDOT, the main benefits are
they can determine how much cement to use
in these treatments with less effort and less time.
And then for the public, what it means
is faster construction delivery times,
because we should minimize the risk of project delays.
- The next step to this is
that we have an implementation project.
So now, we're gonna get materials from all over the state,
west, east, north, different geology, different qualities,
and we're gonna apply this procedure
and see how it all fits.
- [Announcer] For more information
and to find the publications for this project,
please visit the TxDOT Research Library
at the link shown below.