ASPHALT MIXTURE WITH HIGH RATES OF RAP AND HIGHLY MODIFIED ASPHALT FOR IMPROVED PERFORMANCE

The incorporation and reuse of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) is essential for environmental and economic reasons in the construction and rehabilitation of asphalt pavements. The use of significant amounts of RAP has a considerable impact from both economic and environmental perspective significantly reducing the use of virgin aggregates and asphalt. Management of Higher RAP rates involve careful design, and it will impact on the final performance. Many specifications, such as the Argentine one, restrict the use of virgin binders in mixtures with RAP to conventional asphalts. This limits the performance advantages of recycled mixtures that can be obtained by using modified asphalts. In addition, sometimes RAP is very diverse and with different qualities. Then, the use of modified asphalts as virgin asphalt in mixture with high RAP rate can bring advantages. Besides is not extensively study in the literature and had potential important improvement to be studied. Among the new modified asphalt, the Highly Modified Asphalt (HiMA) has emerged, allowing for high-performance mixtures, reduced pavement layer thicknesses, and improved mixture durability. The objective of this work was to study performance improvement by combining high RAP rates with highly modified asphalt binder. Several performance test front rutting, moisture damage and cracking and also an analysis of stiffness module behaviour were done recycled mixture with high rates RAP in which HiMA was used as a virgin binder and compare with two control virgin mixture (with conventional and polymer modified asphalt binder). The recycled mixture shows improved performances in rutting, moisture damage and cracking with a comparable behaviour with the control asphalt mixture with Polymer-modified asphalt and improving the performance of the control asphalt mixture with conventional asphalt. Fatigue performance of HiMA-RAP mixture was better or like the virgin mixture with conventional and Polymer-modified asphalt respectively.