Roadways are considered one of the most important elements of infrastructure and they play an essential role in our daily lives. In road pavement construction, the use of crumb rubber in the modification of bitumen binder is considered as a smart solution for sustainable development by reusing waste materials. It is believed that crumb rubber modifier (CRM) could be one of the alternative polym...

The photodegradation behavior of a straight asphalt was investigated using a new method “photodegradation test of asphalt binder using pressed thin film samples”. Although the photodegradation caused by outdoor exposure is limited to the near surface, the results confirmed that the degree of degradation during 1 to 2 months is more severe than that by the pressure aging vessel (PAV) test, which...

The sustainability movement has established a firm foothold in the Civil Engineering profession. The use of recycled asphalt shingles (RAS) is the latest development in the world of asphalt pavement sustainability. The relative abundance of tear-off shingles and their high asphalt content is driving RAS usage in highway and airfield pavements. However, the ultimate objective of any pavement sys...

This work addresses the development and assessment of a fiber optical viscometer using a simple and low-cost long-period fiber grating (LPFG) level sensor and a capillary tube mechanism. Previous studies of optical viscosity sensors were conducted by using different optical sensing methods. The proposed optical viscometer consists of an LPFG sensor, a temperature-controlled chamber, and a cone-...

Reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) is one of the waste materials that highway agencies promote to use in new construction or rehabilitation of highways pavement. Since the use of RAP can affect the resilient modulus and other structural properties of flexible pavement layers, this paper aims to employ two different artificial neural network (ANN) models for modeling and evaluating the effects of ...

The use of recycled materials in pavement construction has seen, over the years, a significant increase closely associated with substantial economic and environmental benefits. During the past decades, many transportation agencies have evaluated the effect of adding Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP), and, more recently, Recycled Asphalt Shingles (RAS) on the performance of asphalt pavement, whil...

Recent research shows that macro-scale cracking in asphalt binder may originate from its intrinsic defects at the nano-scale. In this paper, a molecular dynamics (MD) simulation was conducted to evaluate the nucleation of natural defects in asphalt. The asphalt microstructure was modeled using an ensemble of three different types of molecules to represent a constituent species: asphaltenes, nap...

The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) has used crumb rubber from ground tires since the late 1960's to primarily reduce reflective cracking. In 1988, ADOT started to use crumb rubber mixed with hot asphalt, commonly referred to as asphalt rubber (AR) as a binder in hot mix asphalt (HMA). Typically, these mixes are either open-graded or gap-graded and from half inch to one inch or one ...

Enhancing Green Paving in Oklahoma Using Recycled Asphalt Shingles Prof. Musharraf Zaman School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science Each year, an estimated 11 million tons of old asphalt shingles from roofs are disposed of in the United States. In Oklahoma, it costs between $50 and $150 per ton, depending on size and kind of debris, to dispose of these materials in landfills. Recent ...

One of the important factors of cracks on the asphalt pavements is bitumen aging that associated with the loss of volatile components and oxidation of asphalt binder. This paper is about effect of Styrene-Butadiene-Styrene (SBS) polymer on asphalt aging In order to decrease asphalt aging effects. For this purpose samples of base bitumen and SBS modified bitumen aged according to the rolling thi...