A review on solutions for improving rutting resistance of asphalt pavement and test methods

Abstract

Permanent deformation, mainly referring to rutting, is one of the main distress modes of asphalt pavement. Exploring effective methods to mitigate the rutting distress is of great significance for providing a long-life and safe road. The rutting solutions were first reviewed. It was found that the efforts from academic and engineering industries focused on enhancing the rheological properties of asphalt binder by adding modifying powder, fiber or mixture into binder or mixture, as well as strengthening aggregate interlock and applying novel pavement structure. Semi-flexible asphalt pavement was suggested to be a promising method to fight the rutting distress, because it has a high mechanical property without scarifying the flexibility of asphalt pavement. In order to consider the influence of temperature on rutting occurrence, cool asphalt pavements, especially heat-transfer induced structures, were reviewed and deemed to be a new strategy for reducing rutting susceptibility of asphalt pavement. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of above rutting solutions, many tests, such as multi-stress creep recovery test for asphalt binder and wheel tracking test for asphalt mixture, were reviewed. By linking the reported results of wheel tracking test with high-temperature rutting mechanism it was advised to develop a test method that could reproduce the real field pavement environment, including multiple stress mode, temperature gradient control system and pavement structure, to assess the rutting response of asphalt mixture. This review is expected to provide an overall insight on the existing rutting solutions and test methods, and recommend future studying areas relevant to rutting distress.