Asphalt Mixture and Binder Fracture Testing for 2008 MnROAD Construction

Principal Investigator(s):

Mihai Marasteanu, Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geo-Engineering

Project summary:

This project collected data on the material properties of the various pavement materials in use at the Minnesota Road Research Facility (MnROAD) through laboratory tests on 12 different asphalt mixtures and nine asphalt binders. The material properties measured in the lab were expected to give an indication of the pavement performance in the field. One important piece of information was the resistance of asphalt binders and mixtures to low temperature cracking; the current trend in this area is to move away from linear viscoelasticity concepts and to move toward tools based on fracture mechanics. The semicircular bend (SCB) test and the double-edge notch tension (DENT) test were developed at the University of Minnesota under pooled fund project TPF-5(080), Investigation of Low Temperature Cracking in Asphalt Pavements, and were used in this project along with the indirect tension test (IDT) and direct tension test (DTT) to characterize all of the MnROAD HMA materials. The project also included mixture creep tests using a modified bending beam (BBR) test procedure. The final report summarizes the results of an experimental effort to characterize the low-temperature behavior of asphalt mixtures and binders from the recently reconstructed cells at the MnROAD facility. In depth analysis of the data was not part of this study; this will be accomplished in several concurrent research projects.

Project details: