Comparative Study of Deicing Asphalt Mixtures on Pavement Performance and Anti-Icing Effectiveness

Recently, the sustained-released salt asphalt pavement has been widely concerned as a new deicer. This pavement is to achieve a long-term deicing effect by adding the snow melting agent to the asphalt mixture and continuously producing salt up to the road surface during the process of use. In this paper, domestic deicer No.1(D1) and No.2(D2) and Japanese snow melting agent Mafilon are selected for a series of comparative analysis, and the road performance and deicing efficiency of mixture containing deicer of various content are studied. Tearing-off test was arranged to show the adhesion between ice layer and mixture surface, evaluating the deicing performance of snow melting agent quantitatively. The result shows that the snow melting agent will damage the pavement performance of mixtures. MFL cuts down the high-temperature performance and water stability of mixture visibly, but impact on low temperature performance and long-term stability more slightly than D1/D2. The content of D1/D2 has a great influence on the performance of the mixture. The performance of mixture appears excellent with 4% D1, while the best content of D2 should be less than 4%. The tearing-off test results show that the salt precipitation rate of D1/D2 is fast, and the deicing efficiency in a short time reaches 3–6 times than that of MFL. However, their useful life span will be narrowed accordingly. The findings in this study indicate that the D1/D2 mixtures have a great potential to be applied in asphalt pavement for deicing, but their long-term performance needs to be further improved.