Time Schedule:
Stephen T Muench
CEE 599
Seattle Campus
Special topics in civil and environmental engineering offered occasionally by permanent or visiting faculty members.
Class description
Covers concepts of hot mix asphalt (HMA) and portland cement concrete (PCC) pavement construction including plant production, transport, placement, compaction, early age behavior, long-term performance and new technologies. This class is open to graduate students and is specifically intended to benefit those with a construction and/or transportation focus. Concepts will be introduced in class using a combination of instructor lectures, guest speakers and student-led discussions.
The Bottom Line As far as I know, this is the only class of this sort offered anywhere. It’s focus on construction and emerging technologies and the team teaching between UW and WSDOT make it unique. None of this is in textbooks and it probably won’t be for quite some time. Come and see why I think roads are so interesting and what lies in store for this $30 billion/year industry. If you do construction or if you do transportation, this will be part of your life.
Student learning goals
Describe the general paving process for both HMA and PCC pavement construction.
Determine productivity, materials and testing requirements and typical quality control/assurance data values for a paving job.
Analyze the variability within a pavement construction job and determine its acceptability using statistical methods.
Describe best practices for pavement construction.
Describe new paving technologies including porous pavement, warm mix asphalt, quiet pavements and warranties.
Understand the importance of observation and data as well as their quality in higher level analysis such as forensics investigations, scheduling, planning and modeling.
General method of instruction
Lectures, group discussions, project obervation.
Recommended preparation
Strap it on and bring it!
Class assignments and grading
About 3 or 4 short assignments and two major assignments:
-Groups of 2 or 3 students will lead the class in a discussion of one pavement-related topic
-Groups of 2 or 3 students will visit a project, collect QC/QA data and write up a project case study.
Grades are based on completed assignments, case study report, leadership of a class topic and class participation.
