Reading Room

People have been optimizing the design of asphalt mix to create more stable and durable pavements foryears. Although Superpave is currently used by most state highway agencies (SHA), its original intentionof incorporating performance tests into mixture analysis portion has not yet been realized. Also, currentvolumetric analysis alone cannot adequately assess mix variables such as recycled […]

Nuclear Gauges for Soil Density (Compaction) Testing By Deborah D. Parkins, PE, Western Technologies Inc. Soil is a building material that supports everything built on the earth and soil density testing using a nuclear density gauge or “nuke gauge” is a simple and accurate way to obtain these measurements. Historically, gauging soil compaction was strictly […]

Indoor air quality (IAQ) affects us all. We want the air we breathe to be clean, allergens (respiratory and topical skin irritants) to be lessened, and exposure to hazardous chemicals and other materials to be non-existent in the structures where we work and live. Poor IAQ potential sources cover a wide range of possibilities and even […]

By Luke M. Snell One of the big challenges on construction projects is to get concrete adequately vibrated. On many projects, the person vibrating the concrete is poorly trained and does not realize that the job is one of the most important to achieving a well consolidated concrete. This has become more critical; now we […]