Date of Award

5-2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Engineering (ME)

Legacy Department

Civil Engineering

Committee Chair/Advisor

Amirkhanian, Serji

Committee Member

Rangaraju , Prasad

Committee Member

Putman , Bradley

Committee Member

Chowdhury , Mashrur

Abstract

The need for more sustainable methods and techniques in industry has been increasing and it is important to respond to the needs of society and address issues surrounding its environment and health. In order to better introduce such new and more sustainable methods, it is necessary to combine existing and proven methods with new technology. The main idea of this research was to use the established industry standard of using Styrene Butadiene Styrene (SBS) modified binder and combine it with the relatively new Warm Mix Asphalt (WMA) technology in order to create a more sustainable and eco-friendly asphalt paving process. Well known WMA technologies, micro water (Aspha-min) and synthetic wax (Sasobit) based, were used to evaluate their effectiveness in SBS modified asphalt binders and mixtures. The four major areas of research were on binder analysis including Superpave binder performance and surface topography; mixture design analysis including Superpave mix design and compaction condition study; oxidative aging analysis and mixture performance analysis.
The general finding was that the WMA additives especially improved the binder properties at higher temperatures namely viscosity and rutting and the various surface images were unique with each binder source and WMA additive. The compaction condition study showed that WMA mixtures had better compaction behavior under lower temperatures and gyrations and also the other volumetric results showed comparability with the HMA (control) mixtures. The oxidative aging results showed that the asphalt mixtures aged in the oven had a higher level of aging than the binder by itself aged in the rolling thin film oven (RTFO). Also, the benefit of using WMA technologies (reduced aging) can be accomplished by using lower aging condition. The mixture performance results showed that there were no differences between the HMA and WMA mixtures as it related to moisture and temperature sensitivity, rutting and long term property

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