Investigation of different test methods to quantify rutting resistance and moisture damage of GFM-WMA mixtures

Abstract

Permanent deformation (rutting) and moisture damage are two dominant failures which threaten the performance of asphalt pavements. Dynamic creep and wheel track tests have been widely used to evaluate permanent deformation characteristic of asphalt mixture while AAHTO T283 and wheel track test were usually employed to determine moisture susceptibility properties of asphalt mixture. However wheel track test is costly and time consuming and the results obtained from different tests by different researchers were sometimes contradicted. In this paper, the dynamic creep test, wheel track test, deformation strength test and AASHTO T283 are conducted. Therefore the aim of this research was first to compare the results of permanent deformation and moisture susceptibility for different tests and secondly to use a simple and static deformation strength test for evaluation of rutting resistance of asphalt mixture. To this end the effect of short term aging on the performance of rutting and moisture sensitivity in warm mix asphalt (WMA) mixtures containing glass fibers and the 0, 20, 40 and 50 percentages of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) by aforementioned tests are evaluated. According to the results of this study, the rutting resistance determined from the simple and static deformation strength test had a good correlation with parameters obtained from wheel track test with R squared of 0.9. On the contrary, moisture susceptibility resistance evaluated with AASHTO T283 appears to have contradiction with the result obtained in wheel track testing.