THE RESEARCHER
Karl Gunnar Ohlson was born in 1925 and has been an Civil ingenieur since 1950. He has had assignments in East Africa, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Libya leading major Civil engineering work for national authorities and as a consultant and an entrepreneur.
Since 1970 his major work has been developing the mixing method based on Particle Technology – which provides major results, economical and environmental benefits and business potentials for all parties involved, including governments.
Mr Olsson passed away in October 2016, but his important work is continued through the company he founded, based on his research.
THE RESEARCH
How it started
The engineer Gunnar Ohlson began building roads already in the 1950s in Tanzania and Libya. In 1970 he came to Kuwait, where customers were not at all pleased with the ongoing road construction. Mr Ohlson was working as a civil engineer supervising the building of road networks in two of the suburbs to the capital in Kuwait.
The gouvernement expected the European contractor to carry out the work to their satisfaction. When this didn’t work out, it ended up in court.
To avoid these failures, Gunnar Ohlson started his assignment by observing the failed pavings. He then began to try a new asphalt mix. Instead of mixing in the binder at the end of the mixing cycle, he poured down the bitumen first together with the larger stones. As the last component, he mixed in the filler and fine fraction.
-The asphalt stuck better to the stones by this procedure and the whole mixture became leaner and tougher. It was a success!
The customers were happy, and thanked him in several letters, which he has saved.
This was the starting point for Mr Ohlsons research, that would continue for three decades and result in a paradigm shift in the branch of asphalt pavings, doubling the life time of the pavings AND reducing the need for raw materials as well as being better for the environment.
The development
Mr Ohlson continued his research and developed three generations of mixing, before he reached a point in the 1990s, where the results could be repeated with scientific accuracy. The KGOIII method is protected by patents.
His experiments with various methods of mixing led him to discover a regularly observable occurrence, a “phenomenon”, in the asphalt. He soon realised that defects in asphalt pavings could be eliminated if this phenomenon could be reproduced under industrial production conditions in an asphalt plant. Once that had been achieved, it became evident that this phenomenon was not some kind of ad hoc hypothesis. This was subsequently substantiated by the fact that this new knowledge about how the phenomenon could be exploited as a functional element of the mixing method led to a paradigm shift in the science of asphalt paving production.
This, in turn, fostered the development of a methodology that was the result of research into particle technology and rheology, two young scientific disciplines from the 1940s, and provided the impetus for further advances relating to the practical application of this knowledge in particle fractions used in the production of asphalts for road pavings.
Projects
In 1998, the Swedish Road Authorities started to test the method in specific projects. The KGOIII method has been documented by the Swedish Road Authorities (VTI and Trafikverket).
The Swedish Road Authorities has a licens agreement and are using the KGOIII method on regular basis throughout the country in nation wide projects.