Influence of Temperature and Rest Period on Damage Repair of Aged Asphalt

Abstract

One important natural property of asphalt materials is the ability to self-repair damages. This property could extend service life of asphalt roads and help deter maintenance to some accountable time. This property is basically working on rejuvenating the aged bitumen when cracks appear. With this purpose, two types of asphalt mixtures were developed. Aged mixture and unaged mixture for the purpose of comparison between the results. The objective of this work is to investigate the effect of higher temperature in Iraq on enhancing the asphalt self-repair. Different rest periods were applied to give time to the bitumen to move and redistribute again while reversing the ageing effect. The major agent in that is the viscosity of asphalt, which is reduced by high temperature and allow the bitumen to move again and increase the wettability of asphalt. The ageing of samples was done in the laboratory according to specifications and the temperature was provided in field as the study focus on summer temperature of Iraq. It was found that applying only temperature on aged asphalt reduced the viscosity and increased the flow of bitumen, which is a highly promising finding at this stage and further investigations are recommended in the end of this study.