Reacted and Activated Rubber

Traditionally, asphalt rubber (AR) mixtures have been difficult to produce. Their production requires specialized plants and equipment, which has resulted in their high cost to manufacture. In part this difficulty is due to the need to produce AR binder by blending it at high temperatures for a significant period of time (typically at about 190°C for 45 min to 1 h). The complexities in the process have caused AR mixes to be significantly more expensive to produce than conventional paving mixtures. A new technology that produces a reacted and activated rubber (RAR), which is an elastomeric asphalt extender, has been developed by hot blending and activation of a rubber granulate with a selected asphalt binder and activated mineral binder stabilizer. RAR achieves results comparable to those of other types of polymer modified binders (PMBs). However, a principal advantage of RAR is that it can be added easily to any hot-mix asphalt manufacturing facility with systems designed to feed particulate material into a batch plant (pugmill) or drum mix plant. This paper describes how RAR is produced from raw constituent materials. Various binder tests contrast performance with typical paving grades and PMBs used in the United States. The implementation of RAR in various types of asphalt mixtures is discussed, and demonstrative examples of test results are provided. Tests on mixtures in wheel tracking and fatigue demonstrate how the binder performance tests translate into mixture performance. In all cases evaluated, the RAR mixtures outperformed nonmodified and even conventional rubber modified equivalent materials.