Specifications & standards authority
Is an outdated spec holding your best product back?
When an archaic limit penalises a genuinely better binder — and the agency is slow to move — bring in someone who has changed the spec before, right into AASHTO practice.
The real question
A specification is a decision written down.
When a new binder, a recycled stream, a supply change, or a field failure lands on the wrong side of a limit, the real question is not “does it pass?” — it is whether the limit measures the thing that actually breaks the road. Kriz Asphalt Technology helps agencies, owners, refiners, producers, and contractors read binder behavior when the grade sheet and the pavement disagree, then turn that reading into a specification position that holds up in front of a committee.
The δPK advantage
δPK: the durability signal the grade sheet misses.
Performance grading reads a binder's stiffness, not its durability — how well an aged binder relaxes stress instead of storing it until it embrittles. δPK reads that signal at a fixed, physically meaningful point, so two binders of the same PG grade are told apart. Pavel Kriz moved it from the rheometer into practice: the 42° phase-angle safeguard now in AASHTO M320 / M332, cited by name as the “Pavel Kriz Phase Angle, δPK.”
Getting a signal into a national standard takes both halves: the science has to be right, and it has to survive the room where the standard is decided. Both are on the table here.
Same PG grade. Different relaxation. Different pavement life. δPK tells them apart.
Where this helps
Support for real material decisions — not more paperwork.
The goal is not to make specifications more complicated. It is to ground acceptance, supply, product-development, and performance decisions in what the material actually does.
Selected publications
Public evidence, not private assurances.
Pavel’s public record spans technical papers, standards advocacy, patents, and presentations on binder rheology, specifications, recycling and diffusion, phase compatibility, polymer-modified asphalt, and refinery-related asphalt quality. A selection:
- 01Phase angle written into AASHTO M320 / M332 — the 42° safeguard for PAV-aged binder testing.
- 02“Pavel Kriz Phase Angle, δPK,” cited by others — a 2026 MassDOT webinar (δ at 8.967 MPa) and a peer-reviewed Transportation Research Record paper (2026, with G. Rowe).
- 03“A Simple Binder Specification Tweak to Promote Best Performers” — CTAA 2020, Elaine Thompson Editor’s Award.
- 04“Efficient and Effective Specification for Asphalts of Today” — CTAA 2023.
- 05“Phase Angle at Constant Modulus in Polymer Modified Asphalts” — CTAA 2024 (Kriz, Noël, Campbell, Kucharek, Rowe).
- 06“Asphalt Is a Choice, Not a Leftover” — PARC 2026, Petersen Asphalt Research Conference, Laramie; public-sourced, peer-reviewed data only.
Start here
Bring the specification question, the binder data, and the stakeholder you need to convince.
Leave with a position that can be defended in the room where it counts — grounded in the material, not the optimism.
Every engagement is confidential.