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European refining, French in particular, is currently going through a phase of rationalization and search for maximum flexibility in crude supplies. For users of bitumen, this creates concerns about the quality and consistency of products delivered, especially as the European standard EN 12591 appears to them as insufficient to ensure satisfactory performance of the finished products, particularly in the case of specialty products such as high modulus asphalt, polymer modified bitumen, and bitumen emulsions. In this context, the search for correlations between bitumen properties and the performance of the finished product is more relevant than ever. The study presented here is focused on asphalt made with pure bitumen. It was based on a standard design, but with two different types of aggregates. After a preliminary selection, 8 bitumen (20/30, 35/50 and 50/70 pen. grades) were selected. The characterization of asphalt mixes covers all the usual characteristics (stiffness modulus, resistance to rutting and fatigue, resistance to thermal cracking, water sensitivity). The characterization of binders, besides conventional testing, includes the rheological properties (DSR, MSCR, and BBR tests) and the compositional analysis, particularly infra-red spectroscopy and SARA analysis. These tests were performed on the original binders, after RTFO, after RFFO + PAV as well as on the binders recovered from asphalt. This project was conducted as a collaboration between Eurovia and the Western Research Institute (WRI) which performed the compositional analysis of binders, including the SAR-AD™ (WRI improved SARA separation technique) and the chemometrics analysis using their software ExpliFit™.

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