The Wirtgen Group has been continuously innovating its products in all its road technology brands.

Ramesh Palagiri, Managing Director & CEO, Wirtgen India

The Wirtgen Group has been consistently developing products which offer better efficiency in terms of fuel consumption and this helps in sustainable development and less carbon emissions, lower life cycle costs and better productivity of these machines. Ramesh Palagiri, Managing Director & CEO, Wirtgen India speaks about the solutions offered for the road & highways sector. Ex-cerpts from the interview…

Could you brief us on the tech-enabled, smart solutions offered by Wirtgen in the roads sec-tor?

To start with we have introduced the cold milling and cold recycling and these two technologies are reasonably well accepted in the market. Soil stabilization is also becoming very popular and all these technologies result in saving resources, faster construction and cost economical solutions.
The cement treated base or sub-base (CTB or CTSB) not only reduces aggregate requirement,
but also ensures stronger foundation and reduces layers. The cold recycling reuses 100% of asphalt pavement material and only addition is bitumen 2-3% which rehabilitates the asphalt pavement to its original properties.

For concrete paving, the Wirtgen slipform pavers can now offer dual- layer concrete paving, where a single machine is used for dual layer concrete paving, the bottom layer and the top layer concrete are paved in a synchronized operation. It is additionally ensured that both the top and bottom lay-ers are paved 'wet-in-wet'regardless of weather or site conditions. This can be done with single paver or with two pavers where it is necessary to distribute the operating weight to two separate machines.

In asphalt paving - the VÖGELE -in line paving where the binder and surface courses are paved 'hot on hot' in a single pass, greatly accelerating activities on a job site. In addition, it is not neces-sary to completely close down the road: the three machines - a paver for the binder course, a paver for the surface course and a material feeder - work 'in line', one behind the other, leaving one lane open to traffic. An ideal solution for rehabilitation of heavily travelled roads. The process is both economical and highly eco-friendly, the layer thickness can be reduced in 'hot on hot' paving, thus lowering consumption of the costly surface course mix.

VÖGELE also offers an innovative and economical solution for the road construction sector with the non-contacting road scan temperature measurement system. The scanning and documentation of the freshly paved asphalt's temperature is already specified in tenders in several markets, and in others there are definitive plans to implement this. After completion of the construction job, con-tractors can furnish detailed evidence that the temperature was maintained within the correct range using the recorded GPS data, including precise tracking.

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