Laboratory and Field Performance Evaluation of Cracking of Airfield Warm Mix Asphalt with Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement at the National Airport Pavement and Materials Research Center

Abstract

The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration is exploring initiatives to decrease transportation greenhouse gas emissions by developing carbon reduction strategies, including using low-embodied carbon materials, such as reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP), in airport pavement construction. However, verifying RAP’s viability for airfield pavements with laboratory and field performance measures is essential. This study compared the cracking susceptibility of a P-401 hot mix asphalt and warm mix asphalt (WMA)+RAP airfield mixes using laboratory performance tests and conducted a preliminary evaluation of pavement responses from accelerated pavement testing (APT) fatigue tests. The observations and outcomes presented in this paper found that adding 20% of recycled materials with WMA additives had a decreasing impact in mix performance but did not overly affect the asphalt mix properties, as cracking properties from the different test procedures were found with comparable outcomes. Additional observations from strain gauges and temperature probes in the National Airport Pavement and Materials Research Center test cycle 2 APT fatigue test sections showed that the maximum tensile strains in the WMA surface lane 5 south section were consistently higher than those in the WMA+RAP lane 6 south section, which may be because of the higher load level that it was exposed. Additionally, the hardened or aged RAP binder in the entire lane 6 south section may have increased its stiffness, resulting in lower strain levels than in the lane 5 south section. Notably, both sections showed an increase in tensile strains with an increase in asphalt concrete temperature, which confirmed the temperature dependency behavior of asphalt concrete.