The Master-Curve Band considering Measurement and Modeling Uncertainty for Bituminous Materials

Abstract

This paper proposes using the master-curve band (MCB) to incorporate the unavoidable measurement errors and modeling uncertainty into the bitumen master-curve construction. In general, the rheological property of bitumen within the linear viscoelastic region is characterized by the master curve of modulus and/or phase angle, provided that the bitumen complies with the time-temperature superposition principle (TTSP). However, the master-curve construction is essentially a mathematical fitting process regardless of whether or not the original data is perfect enough to fit. For this reason, the MCB was introduced to consider the uncertainty information instead of a single master curve. Rheological data of four kinds of bitumen including unaged and aged bitumen were used to construct the MCBs. The results indicated that the generalized sigmoidal model showed the widest master-curve band, followed by Christensen-Anderson-Marasteanu (CAM) and CAM (Gg) models. The width of MCB was a useful tool to identify the sensitivity of bitumen to rheological models. The sensitivity of bitumen to rheological models is associated with the number of active parameters in rheological models and model parameters' confidence intervals. The construction of an MCB was beneficial to select the rheological models. Accordingly, the CAM (Gg) model is proved to be the best to analyze the aging effects.