Performance testing for superpave and structural validation.

Details

• Creators:
  Gibson, Nelson ; Qi, Xicheng ; Shenoy, Aroon ; Al-Khateeb, Ghazi ; Kutay, M. Emin ; Andriescu, Adrian ; Stuart, Kevin ; Youtcheff, Jack ; Harman, Thomas
• Corporate Creators:
  United States. Department of Transportation. Federal Highway Administration. Office of Infrastructure Research and Development
• Subject/TRT Terms:
  • Superpave
  • Asphalt mixtures
  • Binders
  • Performance tests
  • Fatigue cracking
  • Rutting
  • Laboratory tests
  • Polymer asphalt
  • Hot mix asphalt
  • Accelerated tests
  More +
• Publication/ Report Number:
  FHWA-HRT-11-045
• Resource Type:
  Tech Report
• Geographical Coverage:
  United States
• Edition:
  Final report.
• Corporate Publisher:
  United States. Federal Highway Administration
• Abstract:
  The primary objective of this full-scale accelerated pavement testing was to evaluate the performance of unmodified ; and polymer modified asphalt binders and to recommend improved specification tests over existing SUperior ; PERforming Asphalt PAVEment (Superpave®) binder performance grading methodologies. Candidate replacement ; tests were evaluated via their ability to discern fatigue cracking resistance and rutting. Two fatigue cracking ; specification tests were identified as more capable in capturing performance than others: binder yield energy and ; critical tip opening displacement. Two rutting specification tests that quantify irrecoverable deformations exhibited ; the best strength to capture rutting: multiple stress creep and recovery and oscillatory-based nonrecoverable stiffness. ; Based on the full-scale performance and laboratory tests, crumb rubber (recycled tires) modified asphalt (Arizona wet ; process) was shown to significantly slow or stop the growth of fatigue cracks in a composite asphalt pavement ; structure. A hybrid technique to modify asphalt with a combination of crumb rubber and conventional polymers ; (terminally blended) exhibited good fatigue cracking resistance relative to the control binder. Also, a simple ; addition of polyester fibers to asphalt mix was shown to have high resistance to fatigue cracking without the use ; of polymer modification. ; The research study also quantified the capabilities of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program’s ; mechanistic-empirical pavement design and analysis methodologies to predict rutting and fatigue cracking of ; modified asphalts that were not captured in the calibration data from the Long-Term Pavement Performance program. ; Falling weight deflectometer, multidepth deflectometer, and strain gauge instrumentation were used to measure ; pavement response. The results illustrated that the nationally calibrated mechanistic-empirical performance models ; could differentiate between structural asphalt thickness but had difficulty differentiating modified from unmodified ; asphalt binder performance. Nonetheless, the mechanistic-empirical performance ranking and predictions were ; enhanced and improved using mixture-specific performance tests currently being implemented using the asphalt ; mixture performance tester.
  More +
• Format:
  PDF
• Download URL:
  https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/25469/dot_25469_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 5.61 MB]
• Collection(s):
  Federal Highway Administration ; US Transportation Collection
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:9f5b3d800d4e8c588b5a47ac96e566776b07618c0eff97dfa6fc579472113a6e927fd4f1a49a5611006d140b66a0328380f373b9734722d53a306478ee321e7e