CHAPTER 5 M a t e r i a l s used in road pavements

M.J. Brennan and C.A. O'Flaherty

All road pavements require the efficient use of locally available materials if economically constructed roads are to be built. This requires the design engineer to have a thorough understanding of not only the soil and aggregate properties that affect pavement stability and durability but also the properties of the binding materials that may be added to these. The most important pavement materials are bitumen and tar, cement and lime, soil (see Chapter 4), and rock, gravel and slag aggregates. In more recent years, for economic and environmental reasons, renewed attention has been given to the use of 'waste' materials in lieu of conventional aggregates in pavements so these are discussed here also.

5.1 Penetration-grade refinery bitumens

Bitumens used for road construction are viscous liquid or semi-solid materials, consisting essentially of hydrocarbons and their derivatives, which are soluble in trichloroethylene 1. Whilst bitumens occur naturally (e.g. in lake asphalts containing mineral materials), the predominant majority of those used in roadworks are the penetration-grade products of the fractional distillation of petroleum at refineries. It might be noted here that the term 'asphalt' is used in the American technical literature to describe what is termed 'bitumen' in the UK. In the UK (and in Europe, following agreement by the Comit6 Europ6en de Normalisation) the term 'asphalt' is reserved for materials containing a mixture of bitumen and mineral matter, e.g. lake asphalt or hot rolled asphalt. Bitumens that are produced artificially from petroleum crudes (usually napthenicand asphaltic-base crudes) are known as refinery bitumens. Not all petroleum crudes are suitable for the production of road bitumen; those used in the UK are mainly derived from Middle East and South American sources, as most of the North Sea crudes contain little or no bitumen. Bitumen is obtained by a refinery distillation process, which involves condensation in a ffactionating column. The first distillation is normally carried out at oilfield refineries where the crude is heated, at atmospheric pressure, to not greater than 350~ to remove naphtha, gasoline and kerosene fractions. The 'topped' oil is then