For over 60 years the Nebraska Asphalt Paving Conference has been sharing best practices and innovation with Nebraska. Its most recent installment concluded a couple of weeks ago, and I’d like to give you a quick summary of this year’s event. If you are interested in any of the following topics you can find the PowerPoint presentations along with speaker contact information on LTAPs conference website. Kicking off the festivities was Bob Rea, who gets lots of credit for this conference due to the many hours of work he puts in every year to spearhead this event. He talked about Nebraska’s current pavement ratings and their trends. He gave us a good idea of where NDOT is focused with asphalt research and how much asphalt will hit the road over the next year, which is up a bit from previous years. Following Bob was an update from Dr. Hamzeh Haghshenas on important UNL research into different recycling agents that can be used with reclaimed asphalt pavements. Next was Tom Wood talking about the importance of pavement preservation and the use of various asphalt surface treatments. There were many presentations throughout the conference of the latest and greatest in equipment possibilities. The technology that is out there to help you deliver superior asphalt projects is impressive. Mike Vigil from NDOT talked about preservation of bridge decks by using membranes and asphalt overlays, along with a discussion about expansion joints. The coolest accent on the planet was on display when we learned about flexible pavements in Australia and their focus on reducing greenhouse emissions. This was followed by presentations about improving longitudinal joint densities and the benefits of modern binder additives. Then we listened to Vontz paving talking about integral asphalt curbs, Emulsions 101 with Kevin Carlson, then Andy Dearmont with NDOT talking about E-ticketing. The conclusion of the conference was Rusty Simerl from FHWA and John Selmer from NDOT giving their high-level perspectives of current infrastructure funding. There was so much information to gather from this conference. I encourage you to visit LTAPs website and browse the presentations if you are interested.
More details at: https://ltap.unl.edu