I-80 Preservation Asphalt Paving

This UDOT I-80 Preservation High Volume Project located west of Salt Lake City in Tooele County from milepost 70 to milepost 80. The project consisted of a full width 1 ½” roto-mill with a 1 ½” SMA (Stone Matrix Asphalt) overlay both in the westbound and eastbound lanes. The project also added UTBC shouldering, rumble strips, new pavement marking paint with thermoplastic messages, updates to the guardrail, and new delineators.

This stretch of I-80 from the SLC International Airport to the western state line is the main corridor to the West! The growth in Tooele County has been substantial of late and the challenges of this growing area are significant. UDOT has shown continued emphasis on the importance of this highway with multiple maintenances, safety, and improvement projects recently completed or planned for the near future. This project was successful considering the full ride bonus earned by Geneva Rock. GRP and UDOT utilized a partnered approach to achieve the quality standards set by UDOT that will benefit the users of the interstate.

From the start, Geneva Rock and UDOT agreed to utilize GPS-enabled compaction equipment to help measure and monitor compaction efforts, rolling patterns, and best practices. Of special interest was the potential impacts to ride quality created by stoppages in the paving process. Anytime the paver would stop, the location was captured and identified on subsequent profilograph tapes. Geneva Rock Machine Guidance Specialists offered extra assistance to the effort to help assure the timely capture and share of useful data relevant to speed of the rollers, frequency of the oscillating drums, spacing between rollers, and number of passes by compaction equipment on the new mat. This effort contributed to considerable mix incentives for oil content, gradation, and compaction. To help assure a smooth surface, Geneva Rock utilized a dual ski system on the paver consisting of 2-40’ skis utilizing Trimble automation.

Best practices, in this case, included an effort to match the paving process closely with the available trucking capacity to account for fluctuations in the number of trucks available on any given day. Effort was made to closely monitor and measure the pace of the paving which ranged optimally between 25 and 30 ft per min. An additional component was the utilization of a truck staging area outside of the immediate work zone for safety and better consistency/uniformity in delivering SMA in windrows in front of the MTV (material transfer vehicle).