Road-Paver Concept Lays Asphalt Underneath Traffic

• By Alexander George
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• July 27, 2012

A recent design school grad has come up with a machine that can pave roads without shutting down lanes or stopping traffic. Too good to be true? Yes. It’s pure, unadulterated vaporware, but the concept is sound even if the chances of production are nil.

Gosha Galitsky, a graduate of the Umeâ Institute of Design in Sweden, conceived a machine that would re-pave the road beneath while vehicles drive up and over. The Dynapac Red Carpet allows cars to pass over, while the machine re-heats and shapes the road surface using microwaves, a process known as Hot-in-Place Recycling. Microwaves heat the upper road layer and the asphalt binding agent, returning the pavement to its original soft state. Rotating brushes scoop the soft asphalt into a tank where it’s mixed with a small amount of fresh binder. The mixture gets paved back onto the road while a set of rollers at the rear compress the new pavement.

Since the Red Carpet moves so slowly, the recycled pavement has time to cool. By the time the machine passes over, the surface is ready to handle traffic. But its berth only allows for cars narrower than 78.7 inches to pass through. Sorry, Hummers.

Galitsky says that road paving is a process that’s overdue for an evolution: “The machines, materials and processes we use to construct and maintain our roads today have not changed significantly since as far as the 1940’s. Since only one basic configuration of paver exists today, road maintenance has to be done using machines which were originally constructed for paving new road surfaces.”

As a bike commuter in New York City, Galitsky has learned to loathe pot holes and love the feel of fresh asphalt, but, he explains, the incentive to keep shoddy roads is high. “Maintaining the streets generally requires shutting traffic down,” he says, “so there is constant pressure on the road working agencies to delay minor repairs until the road condition becomes so bad that the road needs to be torn down completely and paved again using new materials.”