Phase-Separation Characteristics of Bitumen and their Relation to Damage-Healing

During the service life of flexible asphalt pavements, asphalt concrete degrades due to traffic loading and environmental conditions like temperature, rain, oxidation, ultraviolet-radiation from the sun. All these environmental factors have adverse effects on the performance of bitumen, which is the binder of asphalt concrete. They are known to...

Chemomechanics of Damage Accumulation and Damage-Recovery Healing in Bituminous Asphalt Binders

As a contribution to the development of mutli-scale multi-physics approaches to modelling pavement performance, the present thesis considers the topic of damage accumulation accompanied by damage recover self-healing of the bituminous asphalt phase of pavement systems. It is found insightful that by adopting Hveem’s [1943] concept of attributing...

Temperature induced healing in strained bituminous materials observed by atomic force microscopy

Bitumen is the binder in the composite material named asphalt concrete. Under cyclic mechanical loading of traffic passing over the pavement, eventually damage will initiate in the pavement, leading to eventual structural failure. This damaging process is accelerated by time dependent change of the mechanical properties of asphalt concrete due...

Microstructural self-healing of bituminous materials: Combined experimental and numerical study

Bituminous materials form a class of materials that possess the intrinsic ability to selfheal. This self-healing capability is evidenced by the observation that the service life of these materials ‘in the field’ exceeds the service life as predicted by standard mechanical laboratory tests. This mismatch between laboratory prediction and field...