BITUMEN

1- General.
The Romans called it gwitu-men (pertaining to pitch) or pixtu-men (bubbling pitch), converted, after the barbarian invasions to bitumen. The word passed into French, and then, after the Norman conquest of England in 1066, into English, where it was used interchangeably with tar for over a thousand years (though tar derives from coal, and bitumen from petroleum).

The earliest recorded use of something like bitumen was by the Sumerians, who ruled from the ancient city of Ur on the Euphrates river (near present-day Kuwait). There is evidence, too, that Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar used it for waterproofing and even as grouting for stone roads. In 1595 Sir Walter Raleigh discovered a thick viscous lake in the jungles of Trinidad. This was to be the largest natural deposit of bitumen ever found and was used until the mid 1970s.

In the late nineteenth century, however, bitumen began to be used for the major industrial uses common today, and with those began synthetic production.

Bitumen is black or brown in color. This may occur naturally but is usually made as an end product from distillation of, or extract from, selected petroleum oils.
Those frequently used in road constructions are cutbacks, in which bitumen is mixed with a solvent such as Kerosene or gas oil which evaporates after the material is laid, and bitumen emulsions i.e. emulsions of bitumen with water.

Bitumen is always applied hot. Cutbacks are applied either hot or cold and emulsion is always applied cold. When the emulsion breaks the water evaporates, and leaves the bitumen.
The uses of bitumen are numerous. The chief one in most countries is for road construction. It is also used for surfacing airfield runways, hydraulic applications such as canal lining, river bank protection, dam construction and sea defenses. There are also numerous industrial applications like roofing felt manufacture, printing inks, electrical cable / Junction boxes, mastic for roofing of terraces, duplex paper manufacture etc.

2- HODICO.
The main advantages of these Polybags are the cheap transportation and storage cost, the high endurance during shipping and finally the easy handling

BITUMEN