Road and civil engineering equipment has gone through incredible advancements in recent decades and all of them have been directed towards improving speed, and quality. That is that today's machines pave a lot more road in less time, and they do a better job of it. This turn has also helped to bring costs down when the costs are of course factored for inflation.
Laser technology has brought huge improvements in how things are done in paving today. Lasers are put to all types of uses, including far more accurate measuring and guidance systems and it all begins with the surveyors. You see, road surveyors now use a laser beam to plot a perfectly straight line for setting grade, height and depth of the planned layout.
Laser Saw
Lasers are also put to use in guidance systems; systems that allow a machine operator to follow along a beam for a far more accurate course setting. In fact, lasers are now used in a wide range of general construction equipment with hand held (point and shoot) automatic laser measuring devices now being among the most popular of them.
One huge development in road and civil engineering construction equipment is compact asphalt batch plants that can be dismantled and moved down a highway as the work progresses. Now this is a big change from the way that things were done in years prior to their development. Back when hot asphalt had to be basically trucked in one load at a time.
At these road asphalt micro-plants, gravel is held in a silo and added to a mixer oven along with hot molten tar, as the load is needed. Then after the load has been sufficiently heated and mixed it's dumped out chute to a waiting transport truck. Now the savings from these micro-plants comes from several directions including needing fewer trucks and drivers for the job, as well as of course lower materials costs.
The main paving work is done by the big machine that the dump trucks deliver their loads of fresh mixed hot road asphalt to. It's very sensibly referred to as an asphalt paver and it replaces the old way of doing things, which was basically spreading the material by hand with shovels as it spilled out the back of a dump truck. It's all done automatically now.
It's all done at once with this machine that distributes shapes, forms, and compresses evenly as it trundles down its assigned path. Now earlier versions of this machine, that's made of high grader steel to stand up under its heavy workload, had to be towed behind a large truck. Today though, modern versions are self propelled, and operated by a driver who sits in a comfortable air conditioned cab.
Now even though the fresh road bed that's laid out by the asphalt paver is compacted, it still requires further compaction and this is done with any number of sizes of compacting machines. For instance, there are large rolling compactors that essentially roll on two weighted heavy steel barrels that are used for wide open areas. Then there are smaller units that are used for more closes in work around things like driveways, and drainage grates.