Mechanism and Development of Thermo-Rheological Properties of Asphalts Modified by Reactive Polymer Systems

The new class of reactive polymers is designed to modify asphalt through chemical reactions with asphalt components. The complexity of such systems and the long experience with thermoplastic elastomers as well as with some other “classical” modifiers, and to a degree that our present testing methods and even specifications revolve around these materials, might obscure the fact that we are dealing with rather different modification systems and possibly with new emerging asphalt paving technologies. Our present work attempted to compare two different reactive polymer systems with the “classical” system which uses thermoplastic elastomer. The impact of reactive polymer systems on asphalt was studied through material properties manifested by specification tests and through the development of thermo-rheological properties in linear and non-linear viscoelastic regions. As expected, the behavior of reactive polymeric systems with different chemistries also differed among themselves. The available results showed that the reactive groups of polymers react with polar components of asphalt leading to higher stiffness at elevated pavement temperatures and differing impact on low temperature properties. The data point to a significantly improved resistance to plastic deformation of pavement in the case of reactive polymers, despite the fact that elastic recovery-based specification tests failed to identify this improvement.