Evaluation of Warm Mix Asphalt Binder Rheology and Longitudinal Joint Performance: A British Columbia Study

摘要

Warm Mix Asphalt (WMA) has gained much attention from pavement engineers and the paving industrydue to lower energy consumption during production and lower air emissions during placement. It is notonly beneficial to the environment but also extends the paving season in cold climate regions like Canada.The British Columbia Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure (MoTI) began evaluating WMAtechnology in their road infrastructure rehabilitation program in 2009. Three different WMA technologieshave been evaluated. Foamed Asphalt, Sasobit and Evotherm were used to pave test sections onHighways 1, 3A, and 99 within the southern portion of the Province. For each of these projects, adjacentsections were paved with Hot Mix Asphalt (HMA) for control.In this study, laboratory testing was carried out to evaluate the binder rheology of the different WMAtechnologies that were used to pave BC MOTI test sections and the results were compared to the binder ofthe control sections. In addition, a visual pavement condition survey was conducted for each of the threetest sections and compared to the control HMA sections. Furthermore, longitudinal joint compactionperformance was evaluated by density testing on core samples.