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[no dialogue]
>> Dr. Wafeek Wahby: We are at Howell Asphalt
Laboratories in Mattoon and Charlie Adams and
[unclear dialogue]
>> Charlie: Ok, when you're baking a cake,
if you don't have the right ingredients and the right
proportions, your end product is not going to be correct.
So for us, the beginning of this making of the ingredients
begins here where we start with stone and sand.
We have various sizes of stone.
This may be 1/2 inch in size.
This next container may be a 1/4 inch in size.
The next container may be an 1/8 inch in size.
This aggregate may be an 1/8 inch in size and then the
two pans on the floor, as you see, are very very small,
Including the one that possibly even looks like a cake mix
or face powder that a woman would use.
You have to put all these together in the right
proportions and then mix in liquid asphalt in order to make
a ton of asphalt that is going to be both workable and durable.
So this is where it all starts.
We divide the aggregates into the proper size and then we
physically put them back together again in
those proportions that we want.
There are all kinds of different types of ashpalt depending on
whether is it going to go on a driveway, parking lot,
tennis court, a regular two-lane highway or an interstate.
As you can imagine, the asphalt that goes on an interstate
must be much harder because of the weight of the trucks and
the line of the traffic.
So from here I think we need to go over into the next room,
which is where we mix all of these together.
In order to separate these aggregates into various sizes,
we use seives and these seives are all what
we call standard seives.
These are produced by US Standard Seive, well I am sorry,
it's a US Standard Seive series produced by Dual
Manufacturing, but every asphalt contractor or laboratory in
the nation that is doing this type of work will have
exactly these types of things that
are certified to be exactly the same size.
You can see.
>> female speaker: This is kind of a metal middle
size and then it goes down to a small [unclear dialogue}.
>> Charlie: This one would be obviously for
separating out very large size aggregates.
We would have these at every one of our asphalt plants.
The Illinois Department of Transportation will have one of
these or a set of these, or several sets of these at their
laboratories, Federal Highway administration will have
these sets at every one of theirs.
So when we separate these aggregates, we do give a certain
percentage of these sacks to IDOT and they will go back and
verify the information that we have done and the testing
that we've done corresponds with the test results that they get.
>> Dr. Wahfeek Wahby: So the aggregates that comes
from the quarry will look to come to be examples of them and
from these examples come with proper
100% sizes, you have to resize them?
>> Charlie: We have to resize them so that
we know how to run it back through that asphalt plant.
And just because it's produced at a certain size at the stone
quarry, by the time it travels 100 miles in a railroad car or
travels 150 miles in a truck, that gradation may change.
So we have to verify on location and we're doing this testing
every single day at every single one of our asphalt plants.
>> Dr. Wahby: So you would put all of these
seives on top of each other on a shaker or something?
>> Charlie: That is exactly right.
>> female : And shake it and then you would
measure and weigh how much stayed on this seive and that
would tell you percentage retained as
exactly what you would need to know.
>> Charlie: That is exactly right.
>> Dr. Wahby: Do you do a chart of this?
>> Charlie: Yes, as a matter
of fact, we don't...
We used to draw--now it is all put in a computer and then we
have to provide that information to IDOT on a daily basis.
>> Dr. Wahby: Computer does all the talking?
>> female speaker: Exactly.
[laughter]
>> Charlie: And they have a system that they
refer to as the Mystic System--that's what IDOT calls
it--and all the gradations and all this information goes into
a central computer and a central data base that they retain.
So if three years down the road there was a problem on a
particular project, they can go back into their data base and
they have all this raw information.
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