Concrete road construction is an easy process to take up. The road construction is very durable and of long standing. The time period to bring the road into common use is longer after the road is laid.
The curing of the new laid road layers takes almost a month. Once the curing is done, this road seems to be tougher than any other types of roads.
These roads are quite expensive and once laid will be very tough to remove or make alterations. Even the friction seems to be low for fast moving vehicles. So the roads cannot be completely smooth and require a small amount of roughness to provide friction to the tires.
The construction process involves:
1. Making of the ground: First the engineer has to plan the length and width of the road to be laid and then margin lines have to be drawn using sand or lime powder. This helps the workers to know within what boundaries the work has to be done. Here the top layers of the soil is removed for a depth of one foot or so.
2. Curing of the ground: This is done to keep the ground surface as plain as possible without bumps. Once the top layer is removed to a certain depth. Then the distorted surface is flattened using a machine attached blade by operating it on reverse side. One the surface becomes flat. A thin layer of sand mixed with gravel is laid over and pressed with a road roller. This ensures stable and smooth surface to put the concrete mix.
3. First layer of concrete mix: Here the concrete mixture using bigger size pebbles, sand, cement and water are mixed in the concrete mixing machine thoroughly and poured on to the cured surface. The concrete mix is spread uniformly and surface setting machine is run to make the surface smooth by pushing pebbles down and drawing cement, sand and water on to the surface.
4. Second layer of concrete: This is also a layer of concrete mix but the difference is the size of pebbles (stones) used is finer than before. This is laid on the dried first layer of concrete. This helps the layer to fit firmly on to the previous layer of concrete and also gives a smooth finish to the top.
5. Polishing the surface: Once the moist layer of concrete mix i.e. second layer is spread evenly, the top surface is polished with smooth pads to bring smoothness.
Once polished the road surface is kept wet for few weeks without any disturbance to allow complete setting of the concrete mix.
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