Specialists in soil stabilization, modification, full depth reclamation (FDR) and asphalt pulverization, Rock Solid Stabilization and Reclamation, Inc. (Rock Solid) has more than a decade’s experience tackling projects both large and small. Based in the Upper Midwest, the company has performed services in 21 states. Their experience, particularly with FDR, led to a contract with the City of San Antonio, Texas to totally rehab the Woodlake thoroughfare.
According to Topcon Positioning Systems’ Mark Larranaga, senior manager for paving and software business development, “because this road was so badly damaged, the city decided that a standard ‘mill-and-fill,’ would not suffice. Instead, they opted for the full-depth reclamation, an approach in which the pavement and a portion of the underlying materials are pulverized and mixed with a stabilizing agent to strengthen the entire structure prior to the repave.”
He added that the benefits to FDR are many, including the fact that there is no material to haul off site, resulting in a direct cost savings. Also, because the sub-base is being strengthened, the risk of future failure is minimized.
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Long before the FDR process could begin, however, an initial survey of the full 1.3 miles of road was needed to determine the best design. To do that, Jonathan Pease, Rock Solid’s founder and president, worked with the Carol Stream, Ill.-based Topcon Solutions Store to determine an alternative to traditional road surveying techniques. That alternative was the Topcon SmoothRide Paving Solution.
The initial phase of the SmoothRide process scanned the road surface at normal driving speeds and obtained massive amounts of georeferenced points along the route. “We were able to gather more than 180 million points in a two-hour drive of the road,” said Larranaga. “Surveyed conventionally, that would have taken about two days.”
Once the data was gathered and stored, it was imported into MAGNET Collage software to begin construction of the point cloud. Collage processes and handles mass data at speeds as much as eight times faster than comparable software — with quick rendering and visualization capability. From Collage, MAGNET Resurfacing was used to examine the existing road design and begin formulating the pending changes to it.
With a working design in hand, Rock Solid began the FDR process. The company used a road mixer to simultaneously pulverize the existing 3” – 4” asphalt layer and mix it with the underlying base material. Then, in a second pass, the same machine remixed the material, but did so while also injecting a binding agent to stabilize that sub-base.
