Equipment Used in Port and Terminal Pavements
Pavements represent an important investment for anyone, but for operators of ports and terminals, the word important would be an understatement. In terms of square-meterage, some port and terminal networks are seconded only to local and state governments – with each pavement area needing to be built tough enough to support heavy duty machinery and stacks upon stacks of containers twenty-four seven, three hundred and sixty five days per year. For ports and terminals, pavements are critical.
Profitability and operational efficiency are greatly impacted by early pavement failures, poor performance and expensive repairs. For a port or terminal, having a section of pavement out of service to allow repairs is very expensive in terms of downtime cost per hour and the impact on facility processes.
High-quality testing and condition assessment services facilitate early identification of potential problems. Together with the use of advanced equipment, we can conduct specialist pavement and design testing services to meet the needs of port and terminal operators. As a result, preventative maintenance programmes can be designed and implemented to minimise downtime caused by pavement issues.
An excellent place to start would be with a Heavy Weight Deflectometer (HWD). The HWD is functionally the same as a regular Falling Weight Deflectometer, which is useful for road and lighter-duty pavement testing, with the difference being that the HWD can handle loads up to 240kN. The HWD can simulate the axles of any sort of vehicle a port pavement may likely encounter, ranging from light trucks to container stackers, and even jumbo-jets (it could happen, you never know!). The HWD is best used on flexible pavement, but is also an ideal choice for understanding load transfer efficiency on rigid areas.
Using the newly acquired HWD data, you can create inferences about the pavement properties for lower layers that are critical for developing high-quality mechanisitic-based pavement designs. Of course, for this to work, one would need to understand exactly what these layers are. For this, the geotechnical assessment is unbeatable - the simplicity of drilling a hole into the ground to see what comes can’t be denied, but as a destructive method, it can also be disruptive and inefficient on its own when considering the vast areas that many ports cover. Enter the Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), a vehicle based-non destructive alternative to mass-scale geotechnical assessments. While still needing a small quantity of geotechnical data for calibration, the GPR can cover great distances in a number of hours and produces a continuous stream of pavement profile and layer thickness data at as little as 1m intervals.
These are but a few of our methods when discussing the maintenance of pavements within ports and terminals. For a full exposé, please download our port testing brochure.
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