Extending the life of a runway or taxiway is clearly not only going to be of great financial benefit to an airport operator: it also puts off the inevitable disruption that a major resurfacing project is going to entail. RHiNOPHALT® may be the answer…
RHiNOPHALT® is a preservative for asphalt runways and taxiways, working with the bituminous binder, the ‘glue’ holding together the stones within an asphalt surface. It forms a seal within the bituminous mortar of the asphalt that reduces the stripping effects of water and delays oxidisation, and therefore the deterioration of the asphalt surface.
A spray-applied penetrative sealant that is applied at ambient temperature, RHiNOPHALT® is seen by Milton Keynes, UK-headquartered ASI Solutions, which began offering the treatment into the airport market less than a decade ago, as a rapid, cost-effective and sustainable way of preserving and protecting bitumen-bound surfaces. It can be applied quickly and effectively during daytime or nighttime closures with minimal disruption, and will not only preserve the binder within the asphalt, but also hold the aggregate matrix together in older pavements and add a degree of aesthetic improvement. In addition, because RHiNOPHALT® penetrates into the surface binder, there is no layer that could delaminate or peel off.
Best used as a preventative maintenance measure, RHiNOPHALT® extends the life of the pavement, thereby deferring the high costs of resurfacing and repair work– together with the disruption to congested airport operations that such work entails.
About half of ASI’s airport/aerodrome-based business comes from the military sector. In the UK, runways have been treated with RHiNOPHALT® at airfields including RAF Brize Norton and RAF Northolt. And the success of the work undertaken there may have encouraged the use of RHiNOPHALT® at another Royal Air Force (RAF) base in the south-east of England fairly recently, explains ASI operations director Neil Thomas.
At this particular RAF station, the runway’s 15-year-old porous friction course (PFC) was reaching the end of its useful life. Indeed, such was the condition of the surface that a daily sweep of the runway involved the removal of large amounts of loose stone and aggregate. With new fighter aircraft expected to be deployed at the base in the near future, there was another good reason to improve the condition of what had become a far less than perfect surface.
The decision was taken to extend the life of the runway by three or four years, and the runway was treated with RHiNOPHALT® in May 2014. The work was carried out as part of a runway maintenance contract, with the runway closed for a fortnight. The RHiNOPHALT® element of the project, carried out by Allied Infrastructure ASI’s specialist airfield application partner, actually only took five hours spread over two days, including grip recovery. Aggregate loss and the need for runway foreign object debris (FOD) removal has been much reduced as a result, Thomas confirms.
Another recent RHiNOPHALT® application was for Airbus UK’s facility at Broughton in North Wales. Airbus manufactures wings for all its civilian aircraft at Broughton, with giant Beluga aircraft flying in and out to deliver the wings to the final assembly factory in Toulouse.
The surface at the facility is now over 21 years old. It has been treated with RHiNOPHALT® twice, Thomas informs, firstly in 2009 and then again in 2015. ASI recommends that an asphalt surface be treated with RHiNOPHALT® every five to six years in order to optimise financial benefit and maintain maximum operating efficiency.
ASI is active outside of the UK as well. It has undertaken work in Iceland, Germany, Portugal, Singapore and China for example, while another recent job saw ASI act as a technical adviser on taxiway preservation work at a joint Spanish and US naval air station in southern Spain. It represented the first time that ASI had advised on airport-related RHiNOPHALT® treatment work in Spain and the first contract involving the US military. ASI’s highways partner is also currently active in Spain.
Looking to the future, ASI is currently involved in tendering for airport preservation contracts at a number of key major civil airports in the UK and Ireland, and military bases in Europe, Thomas says. While RHiNOPHALT® is “well-established technology”, it has not yet been widely adopted in this sector. However, that is changing, he points out. Airport operators are opening up to the value of runway preservation as a means of achieving maximum whole life value from the asset, Thomas concludes.
