Thermally Treated Waste Silt as Geopolymer Grouting Material and Filler for Semiflexible Pavements

Abstract

Considering the future shortage of natural aggregates, various researchers have promoted the recycling of by-products into various asphalt pavement types. This paper promoted a double-recycling technique, where thermally treated waste silt was used as a filler for the bituminous skeleton and grouting material of a geopolymer-based semiflexible pavement. Semiflexible pavements (SFP) inherit the flexibility of common asphalt pavements and simultaneously benefit from the rigidity of cement concrete pavements. For this purpose, waste silt obtained from a local asphalt plant was thermally treated at 750 °C and was used as the filler to produce the porous skeleton. Two different materials, including conventional cement-based and a geopolymer-based cement, were used as the grouting material. The geopolymer grout was produced by mixing metakaolin (MK), potassium-based liquid hardener and calcined silt as filler. The porous and grouted samples were characterized in terms of indirect tensile strength (ITS), the indirect tensile strength modulus (ITSM) and moisture sensitivity. The use of thermally treated waste silt as filler in porous asphalt demonstrated promising results and was comparable to the control samples produced with limestone as the filler. However, the control samples grouted with cement-based material outperformed the geopolymer grout in all aspects. Moreover, the addition of calcined silt improved the low-temperature fatigue performance of porous and grouted asphalt pavements.