Sunday, March 4, 2012

INTRODUCTION OF BITUMINOUS MIXES


Bituminous mixes are most commonly used all over the world in pavement construction. Under normal circumstances, conventional bituminous materials if designed and executed properly perform quite satisfactorily. But for special applications like roundabouts or where traffic is extremely heavy, stiffer mixes are required which can have larger fatigue life and more resistance to permanent deformation. It has been found from many researches that the strength of the paving mixes can be enhanced by use of a binder formed by modifying available bitumen with certain additives like sulphur and organic polymers. The modified polymers also improve temperature susceptibility and viscosity characteristics and help alleviating some common problems like bleeding of binder during peak summer temperature and stripping of aggregate in moisture prone areas. The polymers used for modification of bitumen for paving purposes are generally styrene­-butadiene-styrene copolymer, styrene-butadiene rubber, latex, ethylene vinyl acetate copolymer, polyethylene, polypropylene, etc. Most of these polymers, besides being costly, are not available very commonly. Due to these reasons reclaimed rubbers mainly in the form of used tires have been found to perform satisfactorily for years. Keeping the above things in mind, it was felt that an effort can be made to use some material which besides being available easily, is very cheap, or even better, if it is waste material. From this point of view, low density polyethylene carry bags have been used for modification of bitumen in the present investigation. Moreover another reason for choosing this topic is that very little papers are found published with this theme.

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