Investigation of the low-temperature performance of asphalt mixtures via fatigue and linear contraction and creep test

Abstract

Three types of asphalt mixtures, including asphalt concrete (AC), stone mastic asphalt (SMA) and porous asphalt (PA) with a 13mm gradation, are chosen to study the fatigue behavior, linear contraction and creep performance of them. The analysis of the experimental results is summarized as follows. The asphalt mixture exhibits longer fatigue life at low temperature than that at high temperature. But the fatigue life is more sensitive to the loading stress at low temperature. At the same time, the fatigue lives of all the three mixture gradations show decreasing trends with the increasing stress, which implies that restraining over-loading of highways is quite important. The linear contractive quotiety shows great distinction with the types of asphalt mixture gradations and temperature span, which indicates that modified asphalt and lower air voids can benefit to the contractive properties of asphalt mixtures at low temperature. Additionally, the linear contractive quotiety decreases with the falling of the temperature, meanwhile the distinctions between different temperature spans tend to slower. The creep test indicates that lower air voids and larger asphalt content are beneficial to the low temperature performance of asphalt.