A Study on Effect of Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement Material over Virgin Material in Bituminous Mix

Abstract

With increased demand and limited aggregate and binder supply brings the use of Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement (RAP) as a valuable component in Hot Mix Asphalt(HMA) since 1970's in US. Later on, the use of RAP has evolved into a regular practice in many countries around the world and use of these materials in the past has proven to be economically and environmentally sound. Mixing of RAP in virgin materials has been greatly favored over virgin materials because of increase in cost of asphalt, scarcity of quality aggregates and asphalt. The use of RAP in pavement design is Recycling the left over Asphalt through crushing and is recycled back into asphalt which performs equal or better than the virgin mixtures. Now-a- days being more environmentally friendly is important and hence, recycling on site can offer real benefits not only through better planning and regulations, but also saving in the waste disposal charges, energy saving which is modified into the strengthen material. The use of RAP is gaining momentum in India at present and very less studies were carried out and there were no such studies on complete usage of RAP and hence this study was carried out for complete utilization of RAP content in Bituminous mixture. Experimental results show that, RAP materials has much better resistance under compressive load and impact load than virgin materials, i.e. 8.43% of impact value and 6.23% of crushing value was obtained for RAP whereas 12.83% of impact value and 9.07% of crushing value was obtained for virgin material. It was found that 30 to 50% of RAP material can be preferable for the construction of roads where as on using 100% RAP the pavement becomes weak and unstable.