Mathematical Model of the Mechanical Properties of Modified Foamed Bitumen Mixtures with Cement

Nowadays, using in-situ cold recycling has grown substantially as an economical method to rehabilitate the eroded roads. Among these cold recycling methods, the use of foamed bitumen technology has been of much interest to engineers due to its ease and rapidity of implementation. In foamed-bitumen mixtures, in order to reduce the moisture sensitivity and increase the resistance properties, active fillers such as cement and lime are used. But, there is no proper and standard mixture design for these types of mixtures and performing mechanical trial and error experiments is time consuming and expensive. Thus, it seems necessary to find a simple method that has enough accuracy and could estimate the mechanical behavior of recycled foamed-bitumen samples. In this research, mixtures were made by adding foamed bitumen binder (1, 2 and 3 percent) to the recycled material and Portland cement (0, 1, 1.5 and 2 percent), and mechanical characterics of the samples was measured by Marshall stability tests, resilient modulus and indirect tensile strength (soaked and unsoaked). Then, with statistical analysis, a new mathematical formula for each test was presented with appropriate accuracy. The presented models can predict mechanical characteristics of the recycled foamed bitumen mixture on the basis of bitumen percentage and cement with enough accuracy and without spending time and money. Also, it was found that by increasing the bitumen content, the behavior of these mixtures in the performed tests was not similar. Such that increasing bitumen from 1% to 2%, Marshall resistance and resilient modulus increased and thenafter they decreased by increasing the bitumen percent. But, by increasing the bitumen content, indirect tensile strength (soaked and unsoaked) increases too. On the other side, addition of cement increases resistance and decreases moisture sensitivity of these mixtures.