Expert cold mix plant enables several grades of aggregate to be fully blended together before a changeable spray bar provides the binder. Gentle 'folding' then guarantees the bitumen emulsion and bitumen products coat the stone without splitting.

The material can be utilized for binder layers, overlays and even sporting courses for anything but the hardest trafficked roads.

Cold mix asphalt can be laid in exactly the similar way as hot - right through a paving machine - but the rolling that follows is specifically necessary to the way the bitumen emulsion and bitumen products works. Specially made cold mix engineering based on emulsions and substances (known as NYREC and NYMIX) is compaction with a combo of vibratory and pneumatic-tyred rollers which leads to the bitumen emulsion and bitumen products to break, creating the bitumen and enabling the water run out.

In general, a cold mixture asphalt layer can be trafficked quickly after placing, although the mixture does go on to achieve power over time. When set, it seems and acts in a different way from hot mixture - one of the factors the technique has not been used as rapidly as it might have done. Cold combination is usually assessed with procedures that are appropriate for hot mixes but do not reflect the performance of cold mix.

Common performance factors are stiffness and void content, none of which is a right measure of the behavior of a cold mix pavement layer. Endeavors are now being made to deal with this, by adding together a cold mixture design, and methods of assessment that could become the basis for future specifications are being developed.

The 2nd key stumbling block to the uptake of cold mixture is financial. Numerous contractors have immense amounts of money spent in hot mix plants, want to boost these investments and find it hard to consider cold mix.

Switching from hot to cold mixture could significantly lower energy bills and CO2 pollutants, as the quantity of energy required to heat the components in cold mix is minute in comparison with hot mix. Generally, only about 0.1 litres of fuel is needed to deliver one tonne of cold mixed asphalt compared with between 10 and 14 litres of fuel per tonne of hot mix.

One more environmental driver for the use of cold mix is the requirement to maximize the use of recycled road planings, or Recycled Asphalt Pavements (RAP). Among Nynas' range of bitumen emulsion and bitumen products is NYREC, which was made specifically for use with RAP.

Emulsion-based cold mixes allow a far greater percentage of recycled materials to be incorporated into the mix than is possible with hot mixes. Actually a cold mix binder layer can very productively be produced using RAP for the full combination content. Emulsions can also coat planings that are contaminated with tar.