Performance Life of HMA Mixes


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CAIT project no.: CAIT-UTC-049

Fiscal Year: 2013/2014

Status: Final

Rutgers-CAIT Author(s): Imad Abdallah, Patrick Szary, Ph.D.

External Author(s): Brett Haggerty

Sponsor(s): FHWA - RITA, Texas Department of Transportation

Summary:

In any pavement construction process there are dozens of parameters that will ultimately impact the performance of the roadway, and with new materials and processes developed every year, trying to predict the performance of a pavement becomes increasingly more difficult. One of the pavement layers that is important to pavement performance is the hot mix asphalt (HMA).  Mix types, such as permeable friction course (PFC), stone mastic asphalt (SMA), performance design mixes and conventional dense graded mixes are currently used to construct or overlay  roads. Currently, the estimated performance life of different HMA mixes (including the frequency of overlay) by the designers is highly subjective.  Unfortunately, many parameters that can be used to access the service life of pavement layers are stored autonomously, and historically has been impossible to link together. As a result, many state highway agencies have only been capable of performing a qualitative analysis on a handful of factors to predict how a pavement will perform.