Evaluation of pavement materials containing RAP aggregates and hydraulic binder for heavy traffic pavement

Treatment with hydraulic binder is one of the techniques for recycling of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) recovered from road deconstruction. The combined presence of hydraulic binder and bituminous binder (from the RAP) in the mix makes it a composite material, on which the feedback from real road networks is still limited today and which has not yet been considered in the French rational pavement design method (RPDM). The addition of steel fibres in the composite mix allows minimising crack width, solution adopted by the steel fibre-reinforced roller-compacted concrete (FRCC™) technique. FRCC™ mixes with different fibres and RAP contents are compared with another RAP-based material treated with hydraulic binder, ERTALH®. The study discussed in this paper is part of the French National Research Agency project “Recyroute” which aims to evaluate the use of these composite materials in the base layer of heavy traffic roads. Mechanical properties of these composites were investigated by an extensive laboratory test programme. Performance of full-scale pavements was also evaluated throughout an accelerated pavement test (APT). This paper presents the main features and results of the laboratory test programme and the APT experiment as well, leading to propose design parameters of these innovative pavement structures, according to the French RPDM.