Tarmacadam & Asphalt

Tarmacadam

Tarmac (short for tarmacadam) is a type of road surface. Tarmac refers to a material patented by Edgar Purnell Hooley in 1901. The term is also used, with varying degrees of correctness, for a variety of other materials, including tar-grouted macadam, Tarvia, bituminous surface treatments and even modern asphalt.

The first known city to have its streets paved with tar was Baghdad in the 8th century AD. More than 1,000 years later, John Loudon McAdam invented a road construction method called macadamisation. These roads were adequate for use by horses and carriages or coaches, but they were very dusty and subject to erosion with heavy rain. Later on, they did not hold up to higher speed motor vehicle use. Methods to stabilise macadam roads with tar date back to at least 1834, when John Henry Cassell, operating from Cassell's Patent Lava Stone Works in Millwall in the UK, patented "Pitch Macadam". This method involved spreading tar on the subgrade, then placing a typical macadam layer and then sealing the macadam with a mixture of tar and sand. Tar-grouted macadam was also in use well before 1900, and involved scarifying the surface of an existing macadam pavement, spreading tar and re-compacting. Although the use of tar in road construction was known in the 19th century, it was little used and was not introduced on a large scale until the motor car arrived on the scene in the early 20th century.

McAdam's method was more simple and yet more effective at protecting roadways: he discovered that massive foundations of rock upon rock were unnecessary, and asserted that native soil alone would support the road and traffic upon it, as long as it was covered by a road crust that would protect the soil underneath from water and wear.

Unlike other road builders of the time, McAdam laid his roads as level as possible. His 30-foot-wide (9.1 m) road required only a rise of three inches from the edges to the center. Cambering and elevation of the road above the water table enabled rain water to run off into ditches on either side.

Size of stones was central to the McAdam’s road building theory. The lower 200 mm road thickness was restricted to stones no larger than 75 mm. (2.9 in) The upper 50mm layer of stones was limited to 20mm size and stones were checked by supervisors who carried scales. A workman could check the stone size himself by seeing if the stone would fit into his mouth. The importance of the 20mm stone size was that the stones needed to be much smaller than the 100mm width of the iron carriage tires which traveled on the road.

McAdam believed that the "proper method" of breaking stones for utility and rapidity was accomplished by persons sitting down and using small hammers, breaking the stones so that none of them was larger than six ounces in weight. He also wrote that the quality of the road would depend on how carefully the stones were spread on the surface over a sizeable space, one shovelful at a time.

McAdam directed that no substance which would absorb water and affect the road by frost should be incorporated into the road. Neither was anything to be laid on the clean stone to bind the road. The action of the road traffic would cause the broken stone to combine with its own angles, merging into a level, solid surface which would withstand weather or traffic.

Through his road building experience McAdam had learned that a layer of broken angular stones would act as a solid mass and would not require the large stone layer previously used to build roads. By keeping the surface stones smaller than the tire width, a good running surface could be created for traffic. The small surface stones also provided low stress on the road, so long as it could be kept reasonably dry.

Asphalt

Asphalt or bitumen can sometimes be confused with tar, which is a similar black thermo-plastic material produced by the destructive distillation of coal. During the early and mid-20th century when town gas was produced, tar was a readily available product and extensively used as the binder for road aggregates. The addition of tar to macadam roads led to the word tarmac, which is now used in common parlance to refer to road making materials. However, since the 1970s, when natural gas succeeded town gas, asphalt (bitumen) has completely overtaken the use of tar in these applications.

Asphalt can be separated from the other components in crude oil (such as naphtha, gasoline and diesel) by the process of fractional distillation, usually under vacuum conditions. A better separation can be achieved by further processing of the heavier fractions of the crude oil in a de-asphalting unit, which uses either propane or butane in a supercritical phase to dissolve the lighter molecules which are then separated. Further processing is possible by "blowing" the product: namely reacting it with oxygen. This makes the product harder and more viscous.

Natural deposits of asphalt include lake asphalts (primarily from the Pitch Lake in Trinidad and Tobago and Lake Bermudez in Venezuela), Gilsonite, the Dead Sea, and Tar Sands. Asphalt was mined at Ritchie Mines in Macfarlan in Ritchie County, West Virginia in the United States from 1852 to 1873.

Asphalt is typically stored and transported at temperatures around 150 degrees Celsius. Sometimes diesel oil or kerosene are mixed in before shipping to retain liquidity; upon delivery, these lighter materials are separated out of the mixture. This mixture is often called bitumen feedstock, or BFS. Some dump trucks route the hot engine exhaust through pipes in the dump body to keep the material warm. The backs of tippers carrying asphalt, as well as some handling equipment, are also commonly sprayed with a releasing agent before filling to aid release. Diesel oil is sometimes used as a release agent, although it can mix with and thereby reduce the quality of the asphalt.