Development of a recycled polymer modified binder for use in stone mastic asphalt

By D. Casey, Ciaran McNally, A. Gibney, M. Gilchrist. 2008

239 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The number of commercial vehicles using Irish roads has increased considerably in recent years, leading to higher demands being placed on pavement materials and increased use of polymer modified bitumens. This has also coincided with significant changes in Governmental policy which has produced large increases in Irish recycling rates. Improved recycling levels are set to provide Ireland with a new challenge: to find potential uses for the large quantities of recycled polymer that are becoming available. Towards this end, the potential of developing a recycled polymer modified binder was investigated. The polymers most commonly recycled in Ireland were identified and sourced from industry. Fundamental bitumen tests were conducted to assess the effect of the recycled polymer and a mixing methodology developed. It was found that the addition of 4% recycled HDPE into a pen grade binder produced the most promising results, and the mixing process was then optimised with respect to mixing parameters and binder additives. A developmental recycled binder was produced and compared in performance tests to binders currently used in road construction practice. Results obtained from wheel track and fatigue tests show that although the binder does not deliver equivalent performance levels to a proprietary polymer modified binder, it does out-perform traditional binders used in stone mastic asphalt. Recommendations are offered on the further development of the recycled polymer modified binder to achieve the standards currently required.

Subfields: Civil and Structural Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08f1b2084fbcc4f287c989172ad3bf7bedef16a1

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In Civil and Structural Engineering

Citations in the corpus

Reclaimed Polymers as Asphalt Binder Modifiers for More Sustainable Roads: A Review (2019, background): “In relation to the storage stability of the polymer, none of the studies reviewed here have shown stability for this kind of polymer, and have found that its use leads to phase separation [22,44,48].”
Evaluation of permanent deformation characteristics of unmodified and Polyethylene Terephthalate modified asphalt mixtures using dynamic creep test (2014, methodology): “In previous research [9] which was conducted on evaluation of different polymer modified asphalt, because of high melting point of PET it was supposed that PET hinders the mixing, and was not suitable to be used in asphalt modification.”
A review of using waste and virgin polymer in pavement (2012, background): “Not all of these polymers are suitable to modify bitumen although there is sufficient amount of them available for this purpose [76].”
Dynamic properties of stone mastic asphalt mixtures containing waste plastic bottles (2012, background): “Among waste materials waste tire and recycled polymer have a prominent utilization [8–13].”
Using waste plastic bottles as additive for stone mastic asphalt (2011, background): “applied different kinds of polymer as a modifier for the binder (PVC mulch, Isotactic PP mulch, LDPE mulch, HDPE mulch, ABS chips, Isotactic PP powder, MDPE mulch and PET chips) and in the case of PET, they concluded, that its high melting point hindered the mixing, making it impractical to make any”
A review on fatigue and rutting performance of asphalt mixes (2011, methodology): “Casey et al. (2008) used three distinct binders for stone mastic asphalt mixture namely, traditional pen and fibres binder (PF), a proprietary polymer modified bitumen used in practice (PMB) and the developed recycled HDPE modified binder (RP).”