Tuesday, August 27, 2013

A Seal Coating Columbus Contractor Will Help Preserve Your Pavements

By Amanda Baird


Quality sealcoat products are needed when applying a preservative coat over the blacktop. The seal coating Columbus contractor you deal with should use the right products to avoid premature peeling and damage of the coating. Sealcoat preserve the quality of blacktop. Since asphalt pavements undergo chemical changes over time, they have to be preserved. If they are not protected, they can get damaged fast meaning you incur costly expenses to repair damages.

However, when the blacktop is not covered with a weatherproof material, sunlight, water, gasoline products, salts, and other substances begin to cause damage. It is costly to construct roads and driveways and therefore, proper care must be taken. Asphalt material has good visco-elasticity properly when it is newly installed but this element changes over time.

With continuous use of these salts, they cause damage on roads. Once you have constructed pavements, they have a good visco-elasticity property, but this asphalt quality begins to degrade with time. When you start to see your roads fading, it means that they are losing their visco-elasticity quality. The black color transforms and changes to gray and this is a sign that you need to sealcoat your pavement.

Those salts have chemical properties, which act on asphalt. With time, the blacktop assumes a different color from the initial black hue. When you see the road surfaces turning gray, it means that it is time to sealcoat them. You should not wait further when you see your pavements have changed their color to gray. This is because, cracks may form fast and compel you to make major repairs.

Once you have constructed a driveway or parking lot, you have to let it cure. You do not have to sealcoat it immediately since the oils on the blacktop have not dried properly. After about 6 months to one year, you can now apply your first coating. From there, you have to repeat the process after every 2 to 5 years depending on how fast the coat dries out and peels off.

In addition, if you apply a coat on a damaged surface, it will peel off fast. Sealcoating is applied as a cosmetic procedure and cannot be used as a substitute for structural repairs. Asphalt is made up of thousands of chemicals that are open chain. These open chain chemicals make the asphalt to have some un-saturation property. It is this open chain molecule structure, which causes the material to easily attach to other molecules of substances like gasoline and salts.

There are thousands of open chain molecules in asphalt, which make the material to be un-saturated. This aspect makes asphalt molecules to attach to other molecules such as those of salts and petroleum products. In this interaction, the asphalt material disintegrates and transforms in its structural make up.

When the material is exposed to oxygen, this triggers the formation of new polar bonding zones or sites. This process happens continuously meaning that the molecules are rearranging and shuffling about when searching for bonds to create an equilibrium and thermodynamic stable state. The self-assembling process takes place until the material stabilizes. This is ideally the lifespan of the asphaltic material. From the services of a seal coating Columbus contractor, you can lengthen the life expectancy of driveways while at the same time maintaining good traction effect and beautiful roads.




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