Gentle compaction, longer life.

Asphalt compaction with oscillation

Croatia is the hub of South Eastern Europe: all traffic between the Balkans, Greece and Italy transits the country. Its interior is rugged with mountains, making development extremely difficult. A 188 km long motorway leading over the mountains and via Zagreb to Dubrovnik is expected to relieve the heavily trafficked major roads along the coast.

The road construction project held some challenging parameters. First of all, there was the hazard of undetected anti-tank and anti-personnel mines in the ground, leftovers from the civil war of 1995, threatening to detonate. Secondly, the construction experts were concerned about the underlying base as the instable and heavily rugged dolomite is prone to cracking. These factors led to the decision to rely on the gentle and effective oscillation technique for compaction of the new motorway. This dynamic compaction method generates only about 15% of the vibration-related stresses on the environment that are generated when compacting with vibration.

First, however, a Super 2100 road paver from Vögele placed a 7 cm thick base layer on the 140 km long “Bosiljevo Sveti-Rok” section which leads over the Croatian mountains, followed by a 6 cm thick binder course and 3.5 cm thick surface course. Three HD O90V articulated tandem rollers from Hamm effected compaction of all the layers without damaging the native ground. In just three roller passes, the orange-coloured machines achieved a homogeneous target density of 98% and an almost record-breaking daily rate of 5,000 tons of compacted asphalt.