INVESTIGATION OF VIRGIN AND RAP BINDER WITH A COMBINED VOIGT-ARRHENIUS MODEL

The use of Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP) represents a valuable solution for the construction of road infrastructure, both from an economical and environmental viewpoint. Although higher amount of RAP is commonly recycled in paving mixture, the interaction between virgin and aged binder and the effective response of the binders’ blend are still matter of investigation. In the present work different bituminous blends obtained by mixing virgin binder with RAP and artificially aged binder at various percentages, are used to evaluate the rheological behavior of the material through Dynamic Shear Rheometer (DSR) tests. Based on the experimental complex moduli of virgin, laboratory aged binder, and RAP binder, the Voigt and the Arrhenius models are combined to predict the response of the two types of bituminous blends: virgin plus artificially aged and virgin plus RAP binders. The predictions are then compared to the experimentally measured complex moduli of the binders’ blends. The results show that a combination of the Voigt and Arrhenius models is capable of providing very good predictions of the rheological properties over the entire spectrum of temperatures from -30°C to +80°C.