Sugar treatment to strengthen highways

Kuala Lumpur, June 13: Motorists who take sugar for granted may soon be travelling along sugar-treated highways without knowing it, it was disclosed here. Delegates to a five-day conference here on “Road engineering in Asia and Australia” were told that sugar-treated soil-cement mixtures were more durable than unsweetened ones. According to a technical paper presented at the conference, the strength and durability of soil-cement mixture used in road construction is generally affected by a delay between mixing and compaction. Th detrimental effects of the delay are even more pronounced in tropical countries where the high temperature increases the rate of hydration of cement. But, according to the paper, the “addition of small proportions of sugar not only obviates these detrimental effects, but also under certain conditions increases the strength of the soil-cement.” The Malaysian Prime Minister, Tun Abdul Razak, who opened the conference on Monday, in fact expressed surprise over the experimental use of sugar for road construction purposes. He said: “There is an intriguing paper amongst the many submitted for discussions namely ‘the effect of maturity on the strength and durability of sugar-treated soil-cement’. This perhaps might lead to greater use of sugar resulting in cheaper roads but I hope in propounding its use, you would not cause a scarcity of this commodity in world market thus escalating the price of sugar.” The conference, which ends on Friday, is being attended by about 250 delegates from 17 countries, including India, Australia, Britain, Canada, France, Japan, Thailand, Singapore and the Philippines.