Anyone with British friends will see how much they complain about the lousy quality of the tarmac around there. Ironically, a company from the UK has developed a speedy way to fix potholes. Called Velocity Patching, the enterprise made a machine that cleans, seals, and inserts the aggregate in road defects. The whole process takes a bit more than three minutes.
A team of three people goes to the location where the potholes are. Apparently, only two people would be necessary – the truck driver can help the leading operator descend the asphalt compactor from the vehicle and put it back when the job ends. A single person is all it takes for the main tasks.
All this person uses is a single cannon that is held up by a mechanical arm. This cannon blows air at high speed in the hole to clean it up. When there is nothing else there to prevent a suitable repair, the same cannon blows an emulsion (cold bitumen) to seal the pothole and avoid new problems in the future.
After that preparation, the operator activates the aggregate supply, which goes where it should be with the same cannon at high speed and under pressure. The person in charge must have quite some training to put layers of aggregate in the right places and prevent the tarmac from ending up being uneven.
It is at this point that the cannon operator needs some help to put the asphalt compactor on the ground. The truck could include a tool to do that, but that probably makes it more expensive. If the truck driver can help, there is no need for that. Velocity Patching measured how much time it took to fully fix a pothole, and the two guys in charge took precisely three minutes and five seconds. You can check that footage below.
According to Velocity Patching, each repair costs £16 ($19), while traditional patching demands £55 ($66). That is not the only cost advantage the company claims to offer. Its patching method does not require excavation, does not generate waste, and there is no need to close the roads to perform the fix. Productivity is another plus: while the traditional method can deal with only 20 repairs per day, the Velocity patcher can do 200.
The idea is going so well that Velocity Patching recently developed a smaller patcher that fits in narrow Cornwall streets. The truck uses a 19 kW (25 hp) diesel engine in the so-called Velocity Power Pack for this more miniature repair vehicle. In a matter of weeks, the new machine repaired 1,600 potholes in that region at a much lower cost than the city used to have with traditional methods. Your British friends may soon get back to complaining just about the weather.
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