The occurrence of cohesive/adhesive hybrid failure at the bitumen-aggregate interface is widely acknowledged, however, the quantitative evaluation of the cohesion/adhesion proportion is relatively weak. This study explored cohesive/adhesive hybrid failure and provided a quantitative analysis of the proportion between cohesion and adhesion. For this reason, this study considered a variety of experimental factors that included temperature (5 °C, 15 °C, and 25 °C), mineral morphology (three mineral types and three surface textures), and measured film thickness (varying from 10 μm to 900 μm). By performing the bonding strength test, the strength was recorded and interface failure was accordingly captured. The results indicated that the cohesion/adhesion proportion varied significantly with the temperature, mineral morphology, and measured film thickness. In addition, it was found that bonding strength decreased with the increase in the film thickness and temperature, which can be well explained by variation in adhesion/cohesion proportion. Complete cohesive failure was observed when the film thickness increased beyond a critical value at a relatively high temperature. An additional noteworthy finding was the resemblance of a lunar crater for the failure interface at high temperatures, signifying the heterogeneous composition of the bituminous binder around the interface.

@en

Owing to the continuous increase of traffic loads, bitumen modification has been manifested as an efficient methodology to enhance asphaltic pavement performance. Currently, the modification index, defined as the ratio of mechanical properties (e.g., complex modulus) before and after bitumen modification, is extensively adopted to evaluate the modification degree. However, bituminous materials behave as temperature-dependent, which indicates that the mechanical property varies with measured temperatures. As a result, the calculated modification index also shows temperature-dependent property, which inhibits the use of modification index. For this reason, this study introduced a method to eliminate the temperature-dependency of the modification index. In specific, a mathematical model considering the properties of modifiers was firstly established to predict the modification index-temperature curve (MI-T curve). In what follows, the temperature-dependency of modification index was analyzed to verify the proposed model on three types of modifiers, which were graphene, Styrene-Butadiene-Styrene (SBS), and Ethyl-Vinyl-Acetate (EVA), respectively. The results indicated that the developed model could efficiently predict the MI-T curves. Besides, the effective modification area (EMA) and optimal modification index (OMI) were two reasonable indicators that evaluate the bitumen modification without considering the temperature-dependency.@en