OUTDOOR PAVING WITH GRANITE

From a functional point of view, the outdoor paving systems follow two ways clearly distinguishable: the roads for vehicular traffic and pedestrian sidewalks.

In both cases it requires a careful calculation of each of the constituent elements. To do this, it is necessary to know previously the characteristics of traffic loads to be born, taking into account both the weight and intensity during the service life of the pavement.

In addition to traffic loads, it is important to take into account the ease of water saturation by its almost horizontal position – which negatively affects its behaviour against the ice – the deposit of polluting particles on the surface of the pavement especially from road traffic or the dumping of unwanted products.

The breaks of tile pavement are due, in most cases, to errors in the design of it, when the expected traffic is not properly quantified, and almost never to the stone used.

In the spaces for pedestrian traffic, its use is limited to the circulation of people or light vehicles, motor or manually driven, as wheelbarrows, bicycles, shopping carts, etc. Heavier vehicles like cleaning wheelbarrows can run on this type of paving sporadically.

For the use of tiles in roads, it is recommended that the floor dimensions are no larger than 50 cm and simultaneously the thinness ratio is less than 2. So the use of tiles in high traffic roads of heavy vehicles should be limited, as main streets in cities where trucks or buses circulate frequently. In these cases, the paving stone is more responsive to this type of traffic.

The paving stones are often used to pave the streets of cities, loading and service stations, parking areas, squares and even on sidewalks with pedestrian traffic.

Its use has many advantages: speed placement, possibility of partial execution in singular elements (pipes across the pavement, unique placements, interspersed vegetation areas, etc.), fast commissioning (as when they rely on a sand bed, and are re-ligated with it, they can be opened to traffic after being placed), flexibility (because of their small size and its discontinuous nature) as well as resistance and reuse.