RHEOLOGY AND MICROSTRUCTURE OF POLYMER ASPHALT BLENDS

One of the major causes of pavement failure is rutting (permanent deformation). In many circumstances, changing mix design or aggregate types, or other approaches have failed to solve rutting problems in the field. Therefore, polymeric and other additives have been incorporated into asphalt binders to mitigate rutting in HMAO. This is especially true in regions experiencing elevated temperatures and/or high traffic loadings. It is important to further characterize the viscoelastic behavior of these binder systems in greater detail so as to better understand their significance in real performance. This is one of the major objectives of this paper. We will, therefore, attempt to elucidate some of the inherent problems and potential pitfalls in actually making measurements and properly interpreting the results.