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I'm Brad Putman and I'm an assistant professor of Civil Engineering at Clemson University.
I do research in pavement materials, specifically sustainable pavements and materials.
We can engineer the pavement material to have porosity. We can engineer voids into the material
so that instead of 4% air voids, we can have up to 20% air voids that allow water to penetrate
through the pavement surface. With the porous pavement option, we have water
flowing through the surface of the pavement and into the stone where we can store the
water. Then it will eventually infiltrate into the natural sub-grade that we have underneath.
I've been involved with the Aiken green infrastructure project for the last couple of years. With
that project, we're trying to use different storm water best-management practices to reduce
the effect of storm water on the city of Aiken and specifically on the Sand River.
I think one of the big things that we're trying to accomplish with the Aiken project is to
educate people that porous pavement is a legitimate paving surface.
The Aiken project is only the third porous asphalt project that we've done in South Carolina,
so it's nice to see it evolve and learn from each project that we do and move forward.
Hopefully there will be more to come from this and Aiken has been a great showcase project
for us to promote on a national scale.