Assessing Self-healing Asphalt by the Heating of Asphalt Mixtures

Roads are the essential transport modal worldwide since it facilitates the movement of people and goods. Therefore, it is a concern to reduce costs and be sustainable for maintenance and rehabilitation. So self-healing has been studied. The self-healing properties of the asphalt mixtures had already been studied. It is previously known that asphalt mixtures can recover its strength entirely autonomously, or just with a small external stimulus such as heat. The main objective of this paper is to study the recovery of asphalt mixtures only by heating them. After heating, the complex modulus and fatigue resistance were assessed, and the capacity of recovering each mixture was evaluated. AC14 asphalt mixtures (14-mm maximum aggregate size) were produced with conventional bitumen, varying the asphalt content, namely 3.7, 4.0, 4.3, and 4.6%. Fatigued beams were heated from 90–150 °C after fatigue failure. Fatigue resistance tests were conducted at 20 °C temperature and 10 Hz frequency. It was verified that certain conditions of the heating process allow the mixtures to recover some of the initial resistance. Also, it was noted that the higher the temperature and the percentage of asphalt content, it was higher the values of complex modulus and fatigue resistance as well.