Requirements for investigation of physical/mechanical properties of rocks and crushed stone quality in Russia

Abstract

The industry of nonmetallic building materials is a priority industry that determines the current state of the national economy of Russia and the potential for its development. The requirements for the quality of crushed stone are constantly increasing. At the same time, the history of the emergence and development of these requirements has not been studied in the literature. An analysis of historical experience is necessary to identify the patterns of development of technology for the production of road crushed stone and to work out an effective way of development at the present stage. The article studies genesis of requirements for the research of the physical and mechanical properties of rocks and the quality of road crushed stone in Russia. This study is the first system-based and comprehensive study on this topic. The chronological framework of the study is limited to the beginning of the 19th century—the time of the appearance of highways in Russia, and at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries as a period of the emergence of vehicles and the development of requirements for the quality of crushed stone. The article shows that construction of highways necessitated studies into properties of rocks. Russian specialists started from the experience gained in European countries. However, Russian engineers did not copy European experience. They supplemented and developed European experience taking into account Russian realities. It was found that the main indicators of the quality of crushed stone were its strength (resistance to compressive), abrasion and impact loads, grain size, grain size distribution, cuboid shape and contamination with foreign impurities. These indicators are basic in all modern GOSTs (All-Union State Standard) and regulatory documents that regulate the quality of crushed stone. In the same period, methods of determining the quality indicators of crushed stone in laboratory conditions were proposed. The principles underlying these methods, in fact, correspond to modern methods of testing the physical and mechanical properties of rocks. The difference lies in the hardware, experimental conditions and quantitative assessment of the determined indicators.