Rejuvenate the aged asphalt with functional oil emulsion

Abstract The cold recycling technology of asphalt pavement has great economic benefits, is friendly to the environment and has a good development prospect. But the reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) is used as the "black aggregate," and the aged asphalt has not been fully utilized. Therefore, activating and reusing the aged asphalt in RAP is one of the key problems to be solved. By using artificially aged asphalt instead of naturally aged asphalt, this work reports a new technique for activating asphalt of RAP by functional oil emulsion. The functional oil emulsion was prepared by phase inversion method, and the asphalt regeneration effects were studied in detail. The optimum results showed that the solid content of the functional oil emulsion was 50% and the average particle size was 2.17 μm. The storage stability of 1 day and 5 days were 2.2% and 4.8% respectively, and the demulsification time at 20 °C and 40 °C were 2 hours and 1 hour respectively. By studying the penetration, ductility and softening point of recycled asphalt under different dosages of functional oil emulsion, it is found that the parameters of the recycled asphalt recover to more than 94% at 12% content of functional oil emulsion.