Characteristics of Mono-Strand Fiber-Reinforced Hot-Mix Asphalt Mixtures

With premature deteriorations and performance limitations of hot-mix asphalt (HMA) pavements, innovative solutions are needed to enhance fatigue life or rut-resistance of HMA. Various reinforcing methods are widely utilized such as installing geogrid, geocomposite, or geomembrane layers at the bottom HMA to improve the structural integrity of HMA pavement. Such layered systems sometime improve the field performance of HMA; however, such solutions may not enhance toughness, tensile strength, or shear strength of HMA itself due to the location of interlayer systems. A new mono-strand fiber reinforcing material for HMA is proposed in this study to effectively reinforce the HMA not only at the bottom but also inner-side. Adding a small amount of fiber into HMA leads to significant increases in the phenomenological fatigue life of fiber-reinforced HMA compared to the conventional HMA, and four-point bending beam and indirect tensile tests are performed to observe the effect of fiber reinforcement.