Road Performance of an Overlay Material Improved by Rubber Powder Dry-Processing Method in Cold Regions

Abstract

This paper studied a thin-layer overlay material used in cold regions, aiming to solve the contradiction between the low-temperature crack resistance and skid resistance of asphalt mixture. At first, this paper adopted a dry-processing method to solve the possible segregation problem of Rubber Powder (RP)-modified asphalt in real engineering practice, the proportion of minerals in the proposed material was adjusted within the grading range of Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA)-10 for the purpose of attaining asphalt mixture that has satisfactory strength and usability. Then, the proposed material was subject to low-temperature splitting test and Cantabro raveling test to verify its lowtemperature cracking resistance and disintegration resistance, and two parameters British Pendulum Number (BPN) and Mean Profile Depth (MPD) were applied to evaluate the skid resistance of the proposed thin-layer overlay material, and the test results showed that, the proposed RP-modified asphalt processed by the dry method had very good lowtemperature performance, the medium-coarse SMA-10 gradation can well balance the strength and skid resistance of the material, and enhance the applicability of thin-layer overlay material in cold regions.