World Journal of Engineering Research and Technology

Divvela Hari Naga Satya Santhosh* and D. Jyothi Swarup

ABSTRACT

This topic presents a laboratory study of modified bitumen containing polymer (plastic). Presently conventional bitumen and polymer modified bitumen (PMB) are widely available in the market for road and highway construction. Traditional bituminous binders exhibit various limitations with the overloading of vehicles, increasing service requirements and climatic conditions which lead to important stress-related problems. In addition to this, traffic frequency is increasing rapidly as a consequence of a tremendous increase in the number of vehicles. The bituminous surface on a road should have temperature characteristics that can resist plastic deformation at high temperatures and brittleness at low temperatures. Binder modification is a major break-through and the continuous research in this area aiming to produce new binders with better mechanical characteristics allows the manufacturing and application of road bituminous mixtures with higher performance. Plastic can be added to a bituminous mix either by dry or wet mixing process to get a modified mix. In dry mixing, the plastic is added to heated aggregates before adding a binder. In wet mixing, the plastic is added to plain bitumen producing modified bituminous binder, which is then mixed with aggregates. In this study plastic modified bituminous concrete was prepared by both dry and wet processes and the tests were compared with plain bituminous concrete. In the dry-mix process, the plastic was taken by weight of total mix and for wet mix, the plastic content was taken by weight of bitumen. Materials used for the study included coarse and fine aggregates,bitumen and plastic. Plastic is in the form of small pieces cut out of carrying bags and such others. As a first step, aggregates and binders, both plain and modified bitumen, were tested for different properties as per the Bureau of Indian Standards procedures and the materials were found to satisfy the specifications. Marshall Method of mix design was adopted to find out the optimum binder content.

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