Tarmac complete innovative resurfacing project at Liverpool Airport
28.08.07
Runway resurfacing is a unique sector within the construction industry and one that is evolving. The boom in low-cost air travel is putting additional demands on contractors and materials suppliers, which are responding with new ideas - as a recent project at Liverpool Airport shows.
Tarmac National Contracting has just finished its largest airfield job to date at the airport, a £10m contract for resurfacing the runway, taxiways and apron for main contractor Amec. There have been 'firsts' throughout the project, including first use of innovative materials at an airport and unprecedented quantities of work in short shifts. Both have resulted from pressures now typical for UK airports.
Demand for runway availability at Liverpool meant only six hours were available each night, which made laying a total of 90,000t of material far more considerable challenge. Maximising asphalt production and laying within the hours available led to selection and first use of foam mix recycled asphalt at an airport.
The recycled asphalt could also be laid in one pass in 7.5m-wide strips along the whole 2.4km length of the runway's shoulders. Tarmac's project manager Andy Reynolds said: 'This allowed the shoulders to be used for construction traffic. Vehicles were run on the shoulders while we reconstructed the main runway across the remaining 45m width, shaving time off the programme.'
Tarmac specified a very strong pavement for the runway, consisting of a 100mm layer of dense macadam base course, a 60mm Marshall Asphalt binder course and a 50mm Marshall surface. Each layer was bonded together and fixed to the runway's concrete base with Nynas Bitumen's Nyclean bond coat - effectively creating a single pavement layer.
Bonding the upper layers is normal practice, but creating a strong bond with a concrete base is an advance of bondcoat technology, which has also been exported from highway to runway surfacing. Mr. Reynolds said: 'I've not seen anything like it. When we went in to get cores during trials of the pavement, it was stuck solid.'
Despite its best efforts, Tarmac needed around six months to complete its work, partly because it had to be done in the airport's quiet season. Bad weather stopped work on 22 nights. A normal night for Tarmac's 100-strong team involved gearing up in time to move onto the runway at midnight with planers, pavers, rollers, tractairs, sweepers, a bondcoat tanker and spare plant for every item in use.
Planing was followed by bondcoat, laying of the macadam base, bondcoat again and then the Marshall binder course. The team would clear the runway so it could be fully inspected before the first flights at 06:30, which landed on a new pavement course.
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