'Zydex Industries’ path-breaking technology in roadway construction

Potholes to become history with smooth ride: breakthrough by Zydex

January 17, 2023: Vadodara based Zydex Industries has developed and introduced new technology in road construction that enables roads to resist cracking under heavy traffic loads and cyclic weather variations. The speciality chemicals company has been at the forefront in R&D and implementation of new technology to build stronger, moisture resistant roads with superior fatigue response.

Most of the infrastructure is made of soil, sand, aggregates, bitumen, and cement wherein only bitumen is water resistant. This leads roads to deteriorate and lose strength with wet and dry cycles. Zydex has addressed this by increasing strength, improving flexibility (nano-polymers), and manufacturing super bonders for bitumen for flexible pavements.

The first set of technology by Zydex makes aggregates waterproof thus forming a skin like layer that is water resistant. This eliminates pot-holes and ravelling. The second set of technology uses silane and nano-polymer, which, when combined with a small amount of cement, can make the soil GSB mixes water-resistant and strong but flexible. Zydex has also introduced a full range of cement admixtures to address the reduced water requirement thereby improving density of the cement concrete and at the same time make it more flexible to control and reduce cracking to the extent of 90% for building the next generation of concrete roads.

Dr. Ajay Ranka, CMD, Zydex Industries said, “Engineers around the world are keenly looking to adopt technologies that can help realize perpetual pavements at an economical cost. Achieving such an ambitious goal requires reimagining many of the basic facets of how roads have been built over the last 50 years and what the main cause of their failure has been. We at Zydex Industries are nurturing a vision to develop ‘Highway like Roads’ at rural and urban level. Along with highway construction, our unique soil stabilization technology has been adopted by NRIDA, MORD for PMGSY & MMGSY in many states (from Kargil to North East) since 2015 with 1000 Km’s done till March 2022.  Zydex silane nanotechnology based product Zycotherm has quickly become the top choice of all the major contractors due to its anti-strip property and enhanced resistance to moisture damage. Also, our Terrasil ZycoBond combo with cement has reduced the aggregate requirement in the base layers by 60% on an average, with better performance. We continue to prioritize developing new and more effective technology to build high-quality road networks across the country.”

Roads play a vital role in economic development of a country. As per government data, pace of annual construction of four, six and eight lane national highways (NHs) has increased by more than 300% during the past 7 years. India has the second largest road network in the world with a length of over 6.2 mn kilometres with rural roads constituting 71.4% of the total road network in the country as of March 2019 data. Thus building water and fatigue resistance roads is imperative for improving long term durability, reducing maintenance cost and developing formidable infrastructure at rural, urban and national level.