The highway is ready and the construction site is empty but the road is closed? We explain

Building may appear to stretch 11 kilometers It should be much shorter. Matthews Beck, director of concrete quality and technology at Podpol, responsible for the pavement on the final section of the A1 under construction, says that Certified technology is time consuming. It explains step-by-step how to create a concrete-cement road.

Laying the concrete surface, Mateusz Beck admits, is a very complex process. Let’s start with the back office. This technology requires the construction of a concrete plant within the construction site. with knot. One produces material for the lower layer and the other for the upper layer of the road. Vary in total used.

Plants for A1 Piotrków Trybunalski – Kamieńsk Budpol section located in the middle of the section. When road builders decide to start a paver, that is, a paving machine, a truck They supply it with fresh concrete one by one.

In the first stage The “sword” of the machine distributes the bottom layer On the width of the sidewalk, which is condensed by shakers. In addition, the so-called nails, metal rods, to ensure proper cooperation of the boards, to which the road will be divided (cut). That’s it for the top layer of paving, which is spread over a separate section of the paving.

The process does not end with the laying of concrete. Then a preparation is applied to the surface to prevent water evaporation. After a few days, the surface is “cleaned” to reveal buildups of the top concrete layer. This will ensure the proper roughness of the road, i.e. automobile grip.

At this stage, the biggest drawback of this technology appears – the waiting time. For at least 28 days with a new road surface, there’s nothing a road builder can do. Hence the “voids” at the construction site. Only after this period the workers return to the road, for example, to create the side of the road, organize a dividing strip between roads, draw horizontal signs, put up vertical signs.

The paving is capable of laying 300 meters of sidewalks per day. An additional difficulty is transportation. The machine operates on the caterpillars between the bridges. However, when there is a need, for example, for transportation over a bridge (due to, among other things, the weight of the equipment) or from one end of the construction section to the other, the pier must be disassembled into several parts . Not to mention transportation, folding and folding itself takes about 3-4 days.

The time for laying concrete pavement is also extended due to the specific weather conditions that can be done. First of all, it can’t rain. Furthermore it The temperature cannot be higher than 30°C.. If it is warmer, the chemical processes are faster, so there is a greater risk of error.

why all that? For comparison, a new asphalt surface can be commissioned shortly after the bituminous mass has cooled. Asphalt will last a shorter time than concrete. In the first case, the top layer must be replaced at least every 10-15 years. Therefore, the A2, near Lodz, is now being renovated. Concrete sidewalks don’t do that It can last 30-40 years without corrections.

“Concrete is better suited to heavy traffic because it is so More resistant to cracking and deformationTherefore, it is a great option for highways and highways ”- explain experts from the company Nascon, which deals with the improvement of pavement structures.

Another downside to concrete roads is that they are much more expensive to repair, which is why the laying process is slow. You have to completely replace the panels, it is not enough to “glue” the damage that may arise, for example, as a result of an accident or the burning of a car on the road. GDDKiA also ensures that both surfaces are “equally good”. The choice of structure or another is up to the contractors. In addition to A1, the selected sections also contain concrete pavers, among others A2, A4, A18 or S8.

Jacek Lucek, journalist at money.pl