Unsure of the proper flair, so engineering it is.
In: Engineering
Asphalt is made up of stones held together with bitumen, the bitumen is soft like tar so it can flex slowly. The size of the stones is selected so, when a weight is applied, they interlock together.
This combination means an asphalt road is flexible and won’t crack and can also carry a lot of weight.
The top layer of the road, caller the wearing course, contains stones specially selected to be hard wearing so they erode away very slowly.
They’re also selected for differential wearing, which means that, as they erode away, they don’t get polished smooth. A polished smooth road would be slippery and dangerous ofc.
Because the bitumen is soft, you can go at night and slice the top 40mm of the road off and put a new wearing course in. So the asphalt lasts a long time and is very easy to refresh.
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