Asphalt concrete is a composite material commonly used in construction projects such as road surfaces, airports and parking lots. Refined and enhanced to its current state by Belgian inventor and US immigrant Edward de Smedt it consists of asphalt (used as a binder) and mineral aggregate mixed, then laid down in layers and compacted. It is also increasingly used as the core for embankment dams.
The terms "asphalt (or asphaltic) concrete", "bituminous asphalt concrete" and the abbreviation "AC" are typically used only in engineering and construction documents and literature. Asphalt concrete pavements are often called just "asphalt" by laypersons who tend to associate the term concrete with Portland cement concrete only. The engineering definition of concrete is any composite material composed of mineral aggregate glued together with a binder, whether that binder is Portland cement, asphalt or even epoxy. Informally, asphalt concrete is also referred to as "blacktop", particularly in North America.
Read more about Asphalt Concrete: Mixture Formulations, Performance Characteristics, Asphalt Concrete Degradation and Restoration, Recycling
Famous quotes containing the words asphalt and/or concrete:
“And the wind shall say “Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.””
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)