Effect of mixture design parameters of stone mastic asphalt pavement on its skid resistance

Abstract

Although it is well known that the stone mastic asphalt (SMA) pavement has good skid resistance, the skid resistance is not satisfactory and its durability is poor when the mixture design is unreasonable. In order to obtain excellent skid resistance for SMA pavement, this paper seeks to analyze the influence of mixture design parameters on the skid resistance of SMA pavement. The mixtures were designed with an orthogonal experiment. There were five factors, namely the percentage of aggregates passing the maximum size (PNMSA), the percentage of aggregates passing the sieve size which is only one smaller than the maximum size (PNMSA-1), the percentage of aggregates passing the control sieve size (PCS), the percentage of aggregates passing the sieve size which is only one smaller than the control sieve size (PCS-1), and asphalt content (AC), and each factor had four levels. The skid-resistance index (SI) obtained by the 3D measurement was used to evaluate skid resistance. The results show that the three parameters (PNMSA, PCS, and AC) are the key parameters to improve skid resistance. Among them, PNMSA has the greatest impact on the skid resistance, AC is the second, and the impact of PCS on skid resistance is the smallest. Moreover, the design parameters with best skid resistance are proposed.