Commercial Paving Services in Sacramento
Commercial Pavement Repair

The Pavement Life Cycle

Stages of Asphalt pavements

Pavement failure is caused by a number of variables including, water intrusion, stress from heavy vehicles, expansion and contraction from seasonal temperature changes, and sun exposure. It is important to keep up with proper maintenance like crack and asphalt sealing along with asphalt inlays or overlays to extend the life. Pavements will however eventually decline to the point where they need to be replaced.

Asphalt pavements properly designed should last 25 years or more. The life of the pavement can be substantially extended with the professional advice from the team at Biondi Paving & Engineering.

Having a contractor, with decades of experience, evaluate your pavement to determine its specific maintenance needs will help the customer spend its money wisely.

Without knowing the age of the pavement determining where the pavement is in the life cycle is not easy to determine. An expert opinion then becomes invaluable.

As a general rule of thumb using the following five stages you can get some idea of the type of maintenance work that may need to be performed.

Stage 1

NEW PAVEMENT

Little or no maintenance required. Ideally it is a good idea to seal-coat 1 year after the initial construction to achieve minimal water intrusion porosity of the pavement. Re-striping will then need to take place.

Stage 2

INITIAL PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE PHASE

Typical maintenance procedures include oil spot repairs, crack sealing along with initial or second sealcoating and re-striping.

Stage 3

MINOR REPAIRS AND CONTINUED PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE

Typical maintenance procedures include some patch repairs due to localized failures, crack sealing, sealcoating and re-striping.

Stage 4

MAJOR REPAIRS

Typical maintenance procedures include more extensive patching repairs due to localized failures, asphalt inlays or overlays typically using geo-composite interlayers embedded in hot applied asphalt cement.

Stage 5

END OF LIFE REPLACEMENT OF PAVEMENT

Along with removal of asphalt, determinations will need to be made if there is base failure resulting from underlying subgrade failure. Subgrade failure is brought forth by entrapment of excessive moisture. Subgrade moisture infiltrate soil fine particles into the base which then renders the entire pavement section as useless.