EBADE test. Evaluation of resistance to cracking of bituminous mixtures

Felix E. Pérez-Jiménez
Ramón BOTELLA
Rodrigo Miró
Adriana Martinez
Polytechnic University of Catalonia.

ABSTRACT

Fatigue cracking is one of the most frequent and important decay processes occurring in flexible pavements. To evaluate the fatigue resistance having bituminous mixtures comprising these pavements long lasting tests requiring specific equipment are performed. For this reason some researchers are studying simpler to implement alternative procedures and reduce testing time.

The EBADE assay (test sweep DISTORTION) is a cyclic tensile test-compression controlled deformation on prismatic specimens, developed in the Laboratory of Roads of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia-BarcelonaTech, which is progressively increasing the level of tax deformation, allowing to evaluate the deterioration of the asphalt mix at different levels of deformation up to breakage.

This paper presents the results of the application of EBADE trial are presented to analyze the effect of temperature on the response to fatigue cracking of heavy batters made with different types of bitumens, from the variation of the modulus and deformation breakage, and the energy dissipated with temperature. These results clearly show the difference between the behavior of the mixture made from a polymer modified bitumen, compared to the same mixture made with conventional bitumen.