ABSTRACT
Current binder investigations focus on the behaviour of the material from the perspective of failure and do not address the behaviour of the material in the temperature regime between such extremities (20 to 60°C). In this regime, the response of the binder transitions from a viscoelastic solid to a viscoelastic fluid. In this investigation, the transition was quantified using two scales of measurement, one at the microscopic scale and another at the macroscopic scale. At the macroscopic scale, temperature sweep and frequency sweep experiments were performed while at the microscopic scale, FTIR spectroscopy was performed. The transition temperature was estimated for an unmodified and a plastomer modified bitumen in unaged and short—term aged conditions. The transition regime captured from rheological techniques was much more sensitive to the influence of modification process and aging condition, while such sensitivity was not seen in the FTIR measurements.
