Features

Technology and innovations are evolving at a pace never seen before in the history of the road and transport sector. From innovations in materials, such as self-healing concrete and rubberised asphalt, to advances in construction equipment automation, and of course, the dawn of the connected and automated vehicle, we are on the verge of a new era.

The fleet used comprised two Wirtgen W 210s and one W 200i, as well as two Wirtgen WR 2000 soil stabilisers. Located roughly 8 km north-west of the city of Alghero, Alghero-Fertilia Airport is one of three commercial airports on the Italian island, along with Cagliari Elmas and Olbia. Built as a military airport in the late 1930s, Alghero-Fertilia still occasionally handles military aircraft. However commercial flights represent its main traffic and as it serves the provinces of Sassari and Oristano, it is

Sri Lanka’s main international airport now features a new runway surface that will help improve air transport efficiency at the facility The project was carried out successfully, despite a tough time schedule, boosting safety at the airport. This new runway will help increase capacity at the airport, allowing Sri Lanka to develop the tourist sector on which the country depends heavily for its economic growth. The work at the international airport for Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo was carried out with the

A new runway surface has now been laid at MacDill Air Force Base in the US, located approximately 6.4km south-west of downtown Tampa, Florida. This facility is the base for the US Air Force’s Air Mobility Command, which provides airlift, special missions, aerial refuelling, and aeromedical evacuation for the armed forces. MacDill is home to 16 KC-135 Stratotankers and three C-37 Gulfstreams, which use the runway every day. At any point, there will be a steady flow of aircraft departing and landing on the

Beijing ranks amongst the five busiest airports across the globe and its runway surfaces face tough stresses as a result. Over 94 million passengers flew through Beijing Capital Airport (BCA) in 2016 and as many as 70 flights/hour can take off and land during peak times. The 60m-wide middle runway of Beijing Capital International Airport is the busiest of the three runways, with a landing and take-off flight ratio of up to 40%. This runway was first rehabilitated in 1996 and then repaired in 2013 and 2015

Infrastructure services company FM Conway and the UK’s Transport for London (TfL) have set “a new benchmark” for recycling in the highways industry.

Winter road maintenance could be getting more efficient, thanks to the Grip, a black ice detection system from two Finnish research organisations. The Grip allows drivers to detect in real-time slippery road conditions extremely accurately and with costs significantly lower than by any other methods already being used, according the two firms – EEE Innovations and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. The first application of this patented technology is being offered to commercial vehicle owners and

This month’s bitumen technology pages bring you self-healing roads, slippery roads and slimmer roads and explains why one UK contractor has started manufacturing its own polymer modified bitumen - Kristina Smith reports. Professor Erik Schlangen, who heads up experimental micromechanics at the Delft University of Technology is receiving calls from all round the world these days. And it is hardly surprising because he and his team have invented a great new technology: asphalt that heals itself.

Pörner Group recently handed over to India’s IOCL a Biturox plant that has the annual capacity to supply bitumen for more than 1,000km of road. Pörner and IOCL (Indian Oil Company Limited) commissioned the Biturox bitumen plant located at IOCL’s Barauni Refinery near Patna in eastern India. This is the 4th plant operated by IOCL based on Biturox technology. Pörner again provided the license and engineering services.

The city of Västerås in central Sweden is known as a centre for industrial automation and information technology. Innovation abounds here and with it comes strong environmental efforts – meeting carbon reduction goals and maximising the recycling process, for example. A road construction project just outside this picturesque city highlights such innovation.

An Indeco ISS 45/90 is proving essential for demolishing the old Kosciuszko Bridge in New York City. New York City’s old 1.9km Kosciuszko Bridge, which crosses Newtown Creek connecting Green Point, Brooklyn with Maspeth, Queens, has been out of service since April. By the end of the year, the polygonal Warren through-truss structure will be no more. To replace the old bridge, in 2009, the New York State Department of Transportation planned the construction of two cable-stayed replacement bridges.

Construction of Istanbul’s new airport facility is benefiting from the use of a large fleet of machines from the Wirtgen Group. When it is complete, this will be the world’s largest airport and will be able to handle 150-200 million passengers/year as well as 6 million tonnes of freight/year. This will make the facility substantially larger than the world’s current largest airport, the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, which handles around 105 million passengers/year.

By means of digitalisation and modern communication technologies, building information modelling (BIM) techniques are helping to improve construction site planning, process control and operation flow on jobsites.

This year’s theme at the CECE Summit in Brussels was Industry and Politics: a historic transformation process The EU’s internal market must become truly a single market as well as a digital one. But there are storm clouds on the horizon. Europe’s single market is either threatened by political events of the past several years or about to become more secure because of it. That was the nub of an impassioned economic forum panel discussion.