Client: Port of Portland
Product: RePlay Asphalt-Rejuvenating Sealer
Airtrans Way, located adjacent to Portland International Airport, was reconstructed in 2018 and is a busy commercial roadway used by trucks for 24-hour shipping and receiving purposes. Housed along Airtrans Way are the local Hanjin Global Logistics center, Horizon Air’s Air Ops Center, courier service FTL Inc., and a large UPS Distribution Center. Trucking operations are constant along the road.
This summer, through an effort to find an environmentally friendly fog seal that will lengthen the lifespan of the asphalt on Airtrans Way and achieve maintenance cost-savings, the Port of Portland began a test case using RePlay Asphalt-Rejuvenating Sealer along the entire length of the road. As the Port has pavement work history for all its roadways and condition history dating back to the late 1980s, it’s in a unique position to quantify the results of any pavement treatment.
The Port applied RePlay at night when temperatures were low to test Replay’s cure time and to take advantage of light traffic to minimize trucking and employee operational delays. RePlay cures quickly—as fast as 30 minutes, depending on the weather. Craig Stewart, pavement program manager for the Port, said Airtrans Way’s northbound and center lanes were treated with RePlay; the southbound lane wasn’t, for comparative analysis.
The Port is doing extensive monitoring of the asphalt’s performance, including lab-tested core sampling, and will have a detailed analysis of the entire road in sections.
“We will have drone footage of the road that will give us a spreadsheet with the cracks’ lengths and widths,” Stewart said. “A manual visual inspection will be conducted after each flight for monitoring pavement condition and drone accuracy, and we’ll fly and manually survey it every year. The data will be powerful.”
Stewart said the Port will compare the RePlay treated segment of Airtrans Way with the asphalt treated with traditional sealcoating over the years. The Port takes regular water samples, and the 100% nontoxic, carbon-negative attributes of RePlay are especially attractive to the agency, along with the projected cost savings. “We are taking drone footage and conducting visual Pavement Condition Index (PCI) surveys every year.”