Performance evaluation on epoxy modified bituminous mix

The exponential growth road network in our country coupled with large scale industrialization and exodus of population towards the metros and Tier II cities has led to need to develop road network in our country. Bitumen is the most abundantly used raw material for construction of roads which is a bye product obtained from crude oil refineries which is a very limited resource in our country. The dependence of the bitumen sucks huge amount of our foreign reserves thus adversely affects our economy. India is a fast developing country and roads are considered to be life line of the economy of our country. Successive governments have laid emphasis on building the roads, airports, highways etc. due to which the requirement of bitumen is increasing exponentially. Thus there is a need to find alternate materials which can replace bitumen to the maximum possible extent and also be cost effective. To deal with the problem, study on use of epoxy as partial replacement to bitumen in flexible pavement is considered in the present work. Various experiments in labs were conducted to investigate the effect of epoxy resin and bitumen mix and the results were analyzed using Marshall Stability method and then compared with the regular bitumen roads. The results obtained indicate substantial gain in strength thus prompting the use of epoxy as a replacement of bitumen. (c) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 1st International Conference on Computations in Materials and Applied Engineering - 2021