Major breakthroughs have been made in the industrial application of graphene. Recently, the world’s first graphene-composite rubber-modified asphalt pavement was completed on the Nanning Bridge in Guangxi. This marks the first-ever commercial application of graphene in high-grade road and bridge construction worldwide, effectively linking the graphene industry’s value chain—from large-scale graphene production to scalable applications—and paving the way for new directions in the development of the graphene industry.

　　2009 The Nanning Bridge, completed in recent years, is one of Guangxi’s landmark structures and features a steel box-girder design. Due to their high flexibility, strong thermal sensitivity, and the difficulty in achieving adequate bonding between the steel plates and the asphalt concrete layer, steel box-girder bridges subjected to heavy and overweight vehicles with high traffic volumes experience significant bending, tensile, shear, and thermal stresses on the bridge deck, leading to various distresses such as cracking, rutting, displacement, delamination, and bulging. Consequently, pavement construction technology for these bridges has long been a global challenge.

　　The Nanning Bridge has now been completed. 10 During the comprehensive, fully enclosed overhaul following the year-end, the bridge deck pavement will be constructed using graphene-composite rubber-modified asphalt technology jointly developed by Professor Shen Peikang’s team from Guangxi University and Guangxi Zhenglu Mechanical Technology Co., Ltd., while retaining the original road structure design. According to reports, the addition of graphene significantly improves various performance indicators of conventional rubber-asphalt modified pavements. It can effectively reduce pavement temperatures and enhance the pavement’s high-temperature dynamic stability, low-temperature crack resistance, adhesion, and aging resistance—thus effectively addressing many common issues that frequently arise on steel box girder bridge decks. This technology represents a key breakthrough in the field of new transportation materials, with its technical indicators markedly surpassing those stipulated in traditional pavement standards. It offers an effective solution to the widespread problem of short service lives of China’s highways. Moreover, this technology boasts high cost-effectiveness and is expected to generate substantial social and economic benefits.