Investigation of rheological properties of transparent bitume

In the last few years, transparent bitumen has been used instead of traditional black bitumen in order to construct roads in wide range of colors. Roads in natural earth color to bright red color, or livelier light blue to yellow or green or in any requested color can be constructed using transparent bitumen. This paper reports the determination and comparison of the rheological properties of traditional black bitumen and transparent bitumen. Both base black bitumen and transparent bitumen were modified with 5% elastomeric type - Styrene Butadiene Styrene (SBS), and 2% plastomeric type - Ethylene Vinyl Acetate (EVA) polymer. Base and polymer modified bitumens were subjected to conventional and rheological bitumen tests. The intermediate and high temperature performances levels of bitumen were determined according to the Superpave system by performing DSR test on aged and unaged samples. Rutting performance of each bitumen sample was evaluated through zero shear viscosity (ZSV) and multiple stress creep recovery (MSCR) tests. Furthermore, the behavior of both traditional black bitumen and transparent bitumen at high and low frequencies levels at different temperatures were investigated by performing the Frequency Sweep test. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.