Glass can be recycled infinitely by reusing it in the production of new glass products. In the province of Quebec, the collect of recyclable materials is done in a way that glass containers break during transportation and all recyclable materials such as cardboard, plastic, paper and glass are mixed together. To reuse recycled glass to manufacture new glass products, the recycled glass must be exempt from any source of contamination and separated/classified according to the type and color. However, most of the recycling sorting facilities in North America doesn’t have the equipment required to produce a recycled glass quality that meets the needs of the recycling companies. Therefore, the recycled glass is often used as a daily cover material in the landfills. Some research projects are trying to find alternatives to disposal in landfills for recycled glass. The idea of using recycled glass as an aggregate in asphalt mixture is under study at the Laboratoire des Chaussées et Matériaux Bitumineux (LCMB) of the École de Technologie Supérieure (ÉTS).
It is well known that using glass aggregates in asphalt mixture increases the moisture susceptibility (i.e. decrease the resistance to water damage). The basic assumption to explain this phenomenon is that adhesion between bituminous binder and glass aggregates is lower than the adhesion between bituminous binder and conventional aggregates. The work done in this thesis was aimed to study the moisture susceptibility as well as the freeze-thaw resistance of asphalt mixtures with glass aggregates. To do so, the study was separated into two parts. First, the adhesion potential of different bituminous binder-aggregate combinations was measured using a pull-off test. The various combinations were tested under dry condition and after a 7 days wet conditioning (60°C). Subsequently, the evaluation of the linear viscoelastic properties (LVE) of asphalt mixtures with different glass and hydrated lime content was done with the complex modulus test following different conditioning (dry, after wet conditioning, after repeated freeze-thaw cycles). The pull-off test results have shown that combinations of polymer modified binders and glass aggregates are less sensitive to aging (oxidation) than combinations of pure binders and glass aggregates. Regarding the complex modulus test, the modelling of the experimental results under dry condition with the 2S2P1D model was done with a good approximation. Moreover, the comparison of experimental data with 2S2P1D simulated values was proven to be very effective to assess the effect of the various conditioning on LVE properties. The results have shown that hydrated lime significantly improve the resistance to water damage and freeze-thaw cycles.
Lachance Tremblay, É. (Author),
Perraton (Supervisor) &
Vaillancourt (Co-supervisor),
17 Jul 2018Student thesis: Doctoral thesis › Doctorate in Engineering: Engineering