Resilience of rubberised asphalt mixtures containing

Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement in developing tropical

countries.

ABSTRACT

During the last two decades, numerous advances have been made in asphalt technology.

However, many developing countries still use traditional Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) for the

construction of flexible pavements. Despite its proven reliability, its continued use still

divides opinions of policymakers, especially those from tropical countries which are more

prone to damaging effects from environmental deterioration. In this regard, the research in

this paper discusses how traditional HMA can be modified by using different additives,

including local waste materials, to allow the pavement industry in developing countries to be

resilient to an ever-increasing traffic load, prevailing bad weather conditions as well as to

provide a long-term solution to solid waste management. Experimental results show that

warm mix asphalt (WMA) can be produced at temperatures as low as 137 °C using only 2 %

of WMA additive by mass of binder and such mixes can accommodate 25% of Reclaimed

Asphalt Pavement (RAP) by mass of aggregates and 10 % of crumb rubber (CR) by mass of

binder, even if an increase of 8°C in temperature is required. While the same amount of CR

provides the best result for HMA mixes, produced at 165°C, it has been observed that only

10% of RAP can be included in the latter so that to maintain the elasticity of the mix. The

Retained Stability Index (RSI) of the different mixes proved to retain at least 90% of the

compressive strength before conditioning. Although all HMA mixes were more resistant to

moisture damage than WMA ones, the performance of the latter was largely satisfactory.

From the test results, it can be deduced that the performance of the modified mixes are more

than capable of besting the properties of traditional HMA, especially when all 3 additives are

combined in rubberised WMA containing RAP, which has a Stability of about 45 kN, almost
twice as that of the control HMA. A cost analysis shows a net increase of about 6 % per tonne

for modified WMA asphalt mixes while there are negligible cost increases associated with the

modified HMA ones. Being at an affordable cost and with the numerous environmental and

social benefits brought about, the use of modified HMA and WMA mixtures should be the

focal point of the construction policies in developing countries, with each one of them

adapted to a particular use and thereby enhancing pavement resilience in such countries.

Keywords: developing countries, Warm Mix Asphalt, Hot Mix Asphalt, crumb rubber,

Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement, resilience.