Caractérisation des matériaux bitumineux retraités à froid au moyen de la vitesse des ondes de cisaillement

Abstract

More ecological and economic, rehabilitation of pavement with MR will without a doubt be used more and more, and especially cold recycling. However, little information concerning the behaviour of such material in early age exists. A better understanding of the behaviour of these materials, whose characteristics in early age bring complication when running classical tests, is important. Non-destructive techniques exist, such as those using mechanical wave propagation. Used for concretes or to evaluate the behaviour of soils, these methods have proven their efficiency. Keeping that in mind, these methods have been used in the pavement field and some experiments have already been done on hot mix asphalt. The aim of this study is to evaluate if a method based on the analysis of mechanical shear wave generated by piezoelectric rings can be used to characterize a Cold In Place Replacement (CIR) material with an asphalt emulsion. The water content of such material is a least 10% before compaction, which recommends the use of shear waves. Indeed, water is incompressible so shear waves will only propagate through bitumen and aggregates, allowing us to characterize these two only. Finally, measurements can be obtained rapidly and do not require heavy and expensive equipment to be run, allowing to start testing samples right after compaction. The tests show a strong link between water disappearance inside the sample and the evolution of shear wave propagation velocity in the sample. Moreover, water disappearance can be easily related to the evolution of E* in the sample, allowing us to characterize this material using the evolution of the shear wave propagation velocity.

Date	11 Dec 2015
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Alan Carter (Supervisor) & Yannic A. Éthier (Co-supervisor)