Hi,

today I am going to share my last conference experience the RAR2018- Rubberized Asphalt/ Asphalt Rubber, held in South Africa and organised by CONSULPAV.

Before to starting I would like to make just a consideration about that.

In my opinion there are two meaningful reasons to attending a conference.

First, it is a really good opportunity to meet the scientific community, get contacts, feedback about my work and get an update about the state of art.

Second but not in importance, at least for me, it is a good chance to visit new places, cultures and people that otherwise would be difficult to visit/meet.

In this case it was amazing..South Africa!

 

Back to the RAR2018, the conference focus on any and all rubberized asphalt materials containing scrap tire rubber, from a low percentage such as 5 percent to higher percentages above even 20 percent. Since there have been so many recent significant changes in the testing, specifying and application of scrap tire rubber in asphalt this Conference’s focus is literally on all types of asphalt binders or asphalt hot mixes containing any percentage of scrap tire rubber, as well as both wet and dry applications. In addition both generic and proprietary rubberized asphalt products can be reported.

During the conference I had the pleasure to share my research results to the scientific community,
Below the abstract:

Are we correctly measuring the rotational viscosity of rubberized bituminous binder?

A detailed rheological characterisation of Recycled Tyre Rubber Modified Bitumen’s (RTR-MB) is of paramount importance for their modelling, formulation, processing and performance. Nevertheless, adding crumb rubber to the base bitumen, further than improving the material characteristics can also represent an issue for rheologists. In fact, due to their complex structure, obtaining reliable rheological measurements sometime could be a challenge. Previous works have shown that when standard testing geometries and configurations are used for such complex systems a number of changes may occur within the measuring chamber during the test. These changes all contribute to undermine the sample stability that if altered can provide significantly misleading results. This study emphasises this aspect by providing a deeper understanding of the phenomena happening during rotational testing of neat and rubberized bitumen at high temperatures, as well as questioning the reliability of the results. The investigation will present the results of a combined laboratory-based and computational approach, focused on highlighting whether by using standard tools samples undergo lack of stability. Results will also highlight that using a novel testing configuration allows recording more realistic and stable viscosity measurements.

I got really interesting feedback that will drive my research plan in the next future...

That's it...for now!

Ciao