Alternative Testing Protocol to Assess the Bonding and Shear Resistance of Pavement Bituminous Crack-Sealant Material

Abstract

Conventional asphalt binder is widely used as the crack sealing material. Crack sealing is one of the most frequent pavement maintenance methods. The level of performance during service life has a close relationship with the properties of asphalt binder used in the pavement or as crack sealant material. As for the pavement crack mechanism, there are two different working mechanisms that occur within the pavement crack, which is horizontal and vertical movement. Horizontal movements are caused by shrinkage and expansion of pavement due to the thermal changes in pavement material. While, the moisture related changes causes vertical movement. This study aims to introduce an alternative testing protocol that can simulate the real failure mechanism of pavement crack. This is due to limited approaches that had been taken by previous researchers to evaluate the performance of pavement-crack sealant. The tensile strength and resistance to shear stress had been chosen as the main performance evaluations in pavement crack sealant material. Prior to that, the bond test and Layer Parallel Direct Shear Test had been used to evaluate the tensile strength and shear resistance of crack sealant material, respectively. This testing protocols could be adopted by other researchers for further studies and also by the asphalt industry.