Pavement Preservation Journal, Spring, 2012
By Dean Yake
Although chip seal applications are very cost effective treatments for pavement preservation, problems with aggregate retention and the public’s perception of their appearance continues to create further challenges for user agencies trying to stretch highway dollars.
A fog seal treatment has been recognized to greatly enhance chip retention and to provide a hot-mix asphalt type appearance, but conventional asphalt emulsions for fog seals pose application and performance problems of their own.
However, new materials now exist that can speed construction, boost performance, and prolong pavement life. That’s what the Sixth District of the Mississippi Department of Transportation found when it elected to use a high-performance polymer modified asphalt emulsion on a project that was initially let using CSS-1h as a fog seal treatment on a recently chip-sealed road near Biloxi.