Blends of bitumen with polymers having a styrene component

The properties of a 100 penetration grade bitumen are modified considerably, and in a number of ways by the addition of 10 to 40 parts per hundred (pph) of a homopolystyrene and graft, block and random copolymers of styrene with butadiene and acrylonitrile. At low temperatures some blends have a similar stiffness to or even lower stiffness than the bitumen, but generally the blends are more than one order of magnitude stiffer, even when a rubber is added. The contrasting behavior is displayed by a polystyrene and a high impact polystyrene, similar to3% to 4% of grafted rubber on the latter being sufficient to cause the enhancement, even at the 10 pph level, by two different random styrene-butadiene copolymers, and also by blends consisting of different amounts of SBS block copolymer. Some polymers apparently trigger a Hartley inversion of the micellar structure of the asphaltene micelles. High law temperature stiffness correlates roughly with a lower Tg, as measured by the peak maximum in the E plots of the dynamic mechanical thermal analysis (DMTA) and by the steps in the differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) curves at temperatures below 0 degreesC. Tan delta maxima and DSC traces detected the glass transition in the continuous phase and in the dispersed phases, but none of these amorphous polymers formed a crystalline phase, though the DSC traces of the polystyrene and the SBS blends suggested that the polymer-rich phases underwent an aging/ordering process on cooling. Our SBS blends differ in phase inversion behavior and the pattern of loss processes from others that had a smaller asphaltene component.