Projects
About 50,000km of this road is in metropolitan Melbourne and requires pavement base stabilisation—the process of improving the material upon which the road sits, including how much stress and weight it can take. This is traditionally performed using base material made up of carbon intensive cement binder and natural aggregates which are becoming scarce and expensive.
With this project, Swinburne University researchers, Hawks Excavation and the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning are working on an alternative. This project will develop a new process for making pavement bases that replaces natural aggregates with recycled concrete and glass, reducing the need to quarry natural aggregates and diverting waste from landfill. The new process will also replace the cement binder with dry powdered polymers and geopolymers, which are far less carbon intensive to produce.
The project will test the roads made with the new base materials to make sure they perform well. The results will provide important evidence for the Department of Transport and Planning to subsequently develop new specifications for this improved road base material. In this way, the project will remove market barriers to the wide uptake of the new base material, leading to huge cost savings and reduced carbon emissions.
PROJECT PARTNERS
