UC Davis Institute of Transportation Studies

The pavement community, including both agencies and industries, is moving toward more sustainable pavement designs and pavement network management. Increasing amounts of recycled materials, both reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) and recycled tire rubber, are expected to be used in new pavement construction projects in the future to reduce the use of virgin binder and aggregates. The main concern of using recycled materials in new asphalt pavement is the potential negative effect on the performance. Thus, the primary objective of this dissertation is to improve the current laboratory testing technologies and performance assessment approaches for characterizing the performance-related properties of asphalt mixes containing recycled materials and to improve understanding of how these properties affect the performance of asphalt pavements so that they can be designed and constructed better.