Utilization of Waste Plastic Polymers to Improve the Performance of Modified Hot Mix Asphalt

Abstract

Highway engineers agree that if good performance is to be achieved for a flexible pavement the wearing course of flexible pavement should be improved. Water enters the dense-graded bases through cracks, gets trapped and adversely affects the pavement structure and performance under loads. The modification of bitumen by the process of adding polymers mitigates these problems. This research-based study has been carried out by the laboratory analysis firstly the optimum binder content is determined by the Marshall Mix design criterion by using the different percentages of binder content (3%, 3.5%, 4%, 4.5%), then the optimum binder content can be obtained by the graphical values, the optimum polymer content (OPC) values are obtained against (OBC). To modify hot mix asphalt (HMA) the Marshall Mix behavior has been studied thoroughly in this research. For better performance, high-density polyethylene (HDPE), low-density polyethylene (LDPE) and crumb rubber (CR) are specified for the researched-based study. By the addition of 3% LDPE in bitumen content, improvement of 44% is shown, while the addition of 3.5% HDPE in bitumen content improvement of 40% and usage of 3 % CR in bitumen content improvement of 44% is shown. The addition of 3.5% HDPE is recommended to be the best modifier and has shown better results in all aspects.

Keywords

• hot mix asphalt
• crumb rubber
• resilience modulus
• binder content
• polymers
• waste plastic