Abstract—Flexible pavements with bituminous surfacing are widely used in India. Exponential increase in traffic, overloading of commercial vehicles and significant variations in daily and seasonal temperatures have shown some limitations of conventional bitumen performance. Early developments of distress symptoms like cracking, rutting, ravelling, undulations, shoving and potholing of bituminous surfacing have been reported for flexible pavements. A bituminous mixture needs to be flexible enough at low service temperatures to prevent pavement cracking and to be stiff enough at high service temperature to prevent rutting. Bitumen modified with polymer offers a combination of performance related benefits as the physical properties of the bitumen is improved without changing the chemical nature of it. This paper presents the experimental study carried out conventional bitumen and polymer modified binder. It has been shown that rutting resistance, indirect tensile strength and resilient modulus of the bituminous concrete mix with polymer modified bitumen is significantly improved.

Index Terms—Flexible pavement, bituminous surfacing, modified polymer, rutting resistance, resilient modulus

Cite: Ashok Pareek,Trilok Gupta, and Ravi K. Sharma, "Performance of Polymer Modified Bitumen for Flexible Pavements," International Journal of Structural and Civil Engineering Research, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 77-86, November 2012.