The Rotary Viscosity and FT-IR Analysis of Recycled-modified Asphalt

Abstract

As the development of pavement maintenance and rehabilitation, the technologies of recycled asphalt pavement have become increasingly popular due to their advantages on energy conservation and economic benefit. In the present study, to improve the recycled asphalt pavement performance, a kind of new recycled technology named recycled-modified asphalt is proposed. The recycled-modified asphalt was produced by adding a certain amount of rejuvenating agent and SBS (styrene-butadiene-styrene) polymer into the reclaimed asphalt (RA) extracted from the reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP). To explore the feasibility of recycled-modified asphalt, rotary viscosity (RV) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) were performed by analyzing the change of viscosity and chemical functional groups. The viscosity test results indicated that the value of recycled-modified asphalt was between the RA and recycled asphalt, as expected. And the FT-IR analysis showed that the introduction of rejuvenating agent into RA was mainly one physical mixing progress, without changing functional groups. With the addition of SBS polymer, there were new peaks representing C=C bond of butadiene and styrene produced along the FT-IR spectra of recycled-modified asphalt. Therefore, the technology of recycled-modified asphalt is available by analysis of viscosity and mechanism.