People have used pavement drainage systems to keep roads free of water since the Romans started building stone roads 2,000 years ago. Pavement drainage design has changed and improved over those two millennia, and so have people’s drainage needs. Now everyone needs parking lot, highway, and airport runway drainage solutions. Fortunately, Hydraway provides drainage systems that work with a variety of paved surfaces.
Common Drainage Problems on Paved Surfaces
Most pavement drainage problems are related to how water drains through the surface of the pavement. It also involves subsurface drainage, which is how water drains through the layers below the pavement’s surface. Drainage problems on paved surfaces mainly come from the following sources:
Failure to Drain Precipitation
Roadways, runways, and other paved surfaces have to drain precipitation, such as rain or snow, more than any other form of water. Modern pavement design often prioritizes carrying heavy traffic loads, but it doesn’t always drain precipitation well to make the pavement safe for driving or parking. Precipitation can often damage pavement by seeping in through cracks, road shoulders and ditches, and groundwater. Once it infiltrates the pavement structure, the precipitation can degrade its condition and make it harder for the pavement to create the friction that traffic needs to travel across it safely.
Traffic-Related Pavement Degradation
Heavy amounts of traffic can compromise pavement’s quality. This situation occurs especially if it doesn’t have adequate surface and subsurface drainage systems installed beneath and around it. The flow of water and the levels of traffic can work together to cause cracks, erosion, and other forms of pavement damage that make the pavement unsafe to use. These issues reduce the pavement’s durability and lifespan.
Free Water Damage to the Pavement’s Subsurface
Free water is water that flows through sediment and isn’t part of groundwater or water bound by rocks or minerals. It can often infiltrate the subsurface layers of pavement structure in three mains ways:
- As subsurface water that flows under and with gravity’s forces.
- As capillary water, which moves up from the capillary forces of the pavement’s local water table.
- As water vapor that flows through the nearby soil and air.
Free water infiltration contributes to erosion, cracking, and other damage, along with precipitation and pavement traffic. Free water can be the most insidious form of water infiltration because it’s harder to see than precipitation is. It often occurs beneath the ground’s surface, making it difficult to detect if you don’t have a drainage solution in place.
How Do Hydraway Systems Drain Paved Surfaces and Subsurfaces?
Hydraway systems have several different pavement drainage applications. They were originally designed for the drainage of highway pavements. In this application, our systems work as edge drains, which drain water from the edges of the pavement on a highway. Edge drains also appear in parking lots. In these applications, the Hydraway system pulls the water away from the pavement and drains it at the edge. Our systems’ drainage layers let water flow over 75% of their surfaces, letting the water drain quickly and effectively.
However, roadways and parking lots aren’t the only paved surfaces that use our drainage systems. We also provide airport drainage system solutions that drain runways efficiently. In these applications, contractors install our drainage systems beneath runways in trench drains. These trench drains take the water away from the pavement surfaces and subsurfaces without pulling the water to the edge of the runway. If runways use other drainage systems, such as perforated pipe or French drains, they can develop clogs that lead to cracks and potholes in the runway. This type of pavement damage is extremely dangerous for aircrafts on the runway. Hydraway systems drain airport runways quickly, so they don’t develop cracks, potholes, or erosion.
Install Hydraway Beneath and Around Your Paved Surfaces
If you want to install a new drainage system under or around your commercial paved surfaces, ask your contractor about Hydraway. They can reach out to us to order the drainage system and receive support as they install it. We have the products and assistance you and your contractor need to install your new pavement drainage system successfully, no matter where it’s located.
