The South African National Roads Agency Limited (Sanral) has started to prescribe a new cement product to be used by consulting engineers tendering on roads in the Western Cape province of South Africa. Other major road project across the entire country will likely follow suit.
“We were absolutely delighted when we received the news. We purposefully designed SureRoad to improve the roads of South Africa,” says Sibongile Mooko, General Manager of Marketing Services at PPC. SureRoad, which was launched by PPC in 2012, has been engineered to reduce the plasticity of granular materials making them stiffer, stronger and less prone to deformation under repeated loads. It does this by cementing the aggregate particles together and by exchanging ions with clay minerals in the aggregates. It conforms to the recommendations made by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in 2004. The CSIR released a report which recommended using cement in the 32.5M strength class to stabilise road layers. Making cement in roads affordable“Historically, the cost of using concrete instead of conventional material like asphalt in road construction was prohibitive. However, all the improvements that SureRoad offers will mean that any project which uses our product will last longer and thus cost less money in the long term as it will mean fewer resurfacing and consumption of valuable resources,” says Mooko.
The formulation also has an extended setting time which allows sufficient time to mix and compact the stabilised material. It is also compatible with the wide range of aggregates found in South Africa. “Our performance testing has shown excellent results with a wide range of soil types and different road classes,” says Mooko. SureRoad has already been used in notable projects around South Africa, most notably in the resurfacing of the N1, N7 and N12 national roads. Currently, South Africa’s total road network spans over 154,000 km of paved roads. The South African government has placed great emphasis on the maintenance of the national roads as it is an integral part of the supply chain in South Africa.
