Investigation of Recycled Asphalt Pavement Materials Treated by Refined Crushing and Screening Process: Comparison with Conventional Methods
Publication: Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 36, Issue 2
Abstract
Using recycled asphalt pavement (RAP) materials in the pavement industry is a hot issue now, which can reduce carbon emissions significantly. The agglomeration and variability of the RAP materials treated by a conventional crushing and screening process present a challenge for the gradation design and variability control of the reclaimed asphalt mixture, resulting in a lower RAP content and thus a limited environmental and economic benefit. To address it, a refined crushing and screening process was employed for the RAP material to separate the asphalt mortar and the coarse aggregates in this study. To evaluate its applicability on the RAP material, the basic composition, agglomeration degree, variability, and gradation refinement of the RAP material were discussed. The aggregate dispersion uniformity and road performance of the reclaimed asphalt mixtures made with the obtained RAP materials were further investigated; the correlation between the RAP properties and the road performance of the reclaimed asphalt mixture was explored. The results show that the agglomeration degree and variability of the coarse RAP material are reduced significantly by the refined crushing and screening process. The use of the RAP material treated by the refined crushing and screening process can largely improve the uniformity of aggregate dispersion and conventional road performance compared with the use of the RAP material treated by conventional methods. Pearson correlation analysis demonstrates that the RAP agglomerates increase the variability of 4.75 mm sieve passage rates and the asphalt-aggregate ratio, resulting in an uneven distribution of aggregates in the structural composition, thus reducing the moisture sensitivity and fatigue performance. By utilizing the refined crushing and screening process, the variability of the RAP materials can be considerably reduced, thereby enhancing the RAP content and the key performance of reclaimed asphalt mixture. The popularization of the refined crushing and screening process is an effective approach to promote the high-quality use of the RAP materials.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the research fund of Jiangsu Technology Industrialization and Research Center of Ecological Road Engineering, China (No. GCZX2202), the National Key R&D Program of China (2021YFB2601200), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (B210202050).
Author contributions: Ning Li: methodology, writing-review and editing, and supervision. He Zhan: investigation and writing-original draft. Hengzhen Li: investigation and methodology. Xin Yu: resources, funding acquisition, and supervision. Wei Tang: investigation and methodology. Zhongyuan Wang: investigation. Yu Zhang: investigation.
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Published In
Journal of Materials in Civil Engineering
Volume 36 • Issue 2 • February 2024
Copyright
© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 11, 2023
Accepted: Aug 4, 2023
Published online: Nov 27, 2023
Published in print: Feb 1, 2024
Discussion open until: Apr 27, 2024
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