The effect of crumb rubber on asphalt pavement resistance to rutting and thermal cracking

To ensure sustainable and long-term asphalt pavement performance, it is necessary to use the highest quality materials and modified bitumen. Usually in Lithuania expensive polymers are used for bitumen modification. Because of fact, that crumb rubber composition contains more than 50% polymers, there is no doubts about crumb rubber can be used for bitumen modification. However, it is necessary to comprehensively test and determine bitumen modification conditions and characteristics of modified bitumen, which would ensure sustainable and log-term road pavement performance.

The aim of the dissertation is to determine and scientificly justify sufficient amount of crumb rubber fo bitumen modification to ensure long-term road pavement rutting resistance and low temperature impact. The dissertation consist of introduction, three chapers, general conclusions, recommendations, the list of references, the list of author’s publications on the topic of the dissertation, summary in English and eight annexes. Introduction describes the studied problem, topicality of the work and the object of research, the formulated aim and tasks, reseach methodology, scientific novelty, practical value of results, the defendend propositions and the scope of the scientific work. Chapter 1 contains a review of research works, gives the analysis of the influence of asphalt mixture components on road pavement performance, technologies and materials of bitumen modification, technologies of crumb rubber preparation, experience of bitumen and asphalt mixture modification using crumb rubber. Chapter 2 describes experimental research of sufficient crumb rubber amount for bitumen modification. The chapter gives the analysis of the effect of crumb rubber amount on bitumen physical and mechanical properties at high and low temperature. The chapter presents the object of experimental research, also plan, equipment used in the experiment and methodology. Moreover, evaluated crumb rubber modified bitumen multiple stress creep recovery. Chapter 3 presents evaluation of modified bitumen properties according to Superpave (PG) system, gives results and analysis of the crumb rubber and polymer modified bitumen and asphalt mixtures with these bitumens rutting resistance. Relationship between bitumen and asphalt mixture rutting resistance paremeters was carried out. Economical effect of bitumen modification using crumb rubber was calculated. Moreover, the most rational bitumen modification conditions were determined by multi-criteria SAW method.

On the topic of the dissertation, 14 scientific articles were published: three – in scientific journals included in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science, two – in reviewed scientifical journals, five – in the Clarivate Analytics Proceedings data base publications, four – in the scientific conferences material.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.20334/2018-006-M