Modeling and assessment of self-healing and thixotropy properties for modified binders

Abstract The fatigue endurance limit of binders is the results of more phenomena (e.g. viscoelasticity, damage, healing, thixotropy, steric hardening) that interact simultaneously making the mechanisms behind the fatigue behavior not properly understood. Currently, there is no consolidated analytical approach inclusive of such phenomena to characterize fatigue performance. This research proposes a criterion to determine the fatigue resistance of binders subjected to monotonous cyclic loading with multiple rest periods. The main rheological properties are measured during each stage using a Dynamic Shear Rheometer and the modeling of their evolution is proposed. The experimental program includes different binders in order to investigate the effects of SBS modification levels and aged binder contents on self-healing potential and fatigue behavior. The proposed criterion enables to identify fundamental contributions leading to a comprehensive fatigue endurance limit. This approach allows different binders to be distinguished taking into account their self-healing capacity and can help to establish a better correlation with in-service performance of mixtures. Moreover, a comparison with a previous analytical approach based on the same kind of test (time sweep) with only one rest period is proposed in order to evaluate the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed criterion. Results show that multiple rest periods are needed in order to fully understand the self-healing and fatigue behavior of bituminous binders and to quantify the contributions given by thixotropy.