Role of Performance Specifications in Developing a Quality Control System for Winter Maintenance

摘要

Fffective winter maintenance makes use of freezing point depressant chemicals to prevent the formation of the bond between snow and ice and the highway pavement. In performing such winter maintenance, the selection of appropriate chemicals for the bond prevention task involves consideration of a number of factors, as indicated by Nixon and Williams (1). The factors are, in essence, performance measurements of the chemical, and as such can be incorporated easily into a specification document to allow for selection of the best chemicals for a given agency to use in its winter maintenance activities. Once performance measures for deicing or anti-icing chemicals have been specified, this allows the creation of a quality control program for the acceptance of those chemicals. This paper presents a series of performance measurement tests for chemicals and discusses the role that they can play in such a quality control program. Some tests are simple and rapid enough that they can be performed on every load of chemicals received, while for others a sampling technique must be used. An appropriate sampling technique is presented in this paper. Further, each test is categorized as to whether it should be applied to every load of chemicals or on a sampling basis. However, applying quality control to the chemicals as received is only part of a much broader quality program This paper explores how the quality control of chemicals can be extended into a program mat applies quality measures throughout winter maintenance activities. Obviously, such an extension involves performance measures, and these issues also are considered.