EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION ON DRY ASPHALT RUBBER FOR SUBBALLAST

The asphalt rubber mixes have a wide application field in the railroad and road superstructures because of their technical and environmental properties. While in many countries the wet process is often used to make bituminous mixtures, the dry process doesn’t have the same degree of application even though a larger recycling of waste tires rubber is allowed than the dry process. This paper focuses on the mix-design of the Dry Asphalt Rubber (DAR) for subballast of the railroad superstructure in order to define a sound laboratory procedure of mix-design with reference to Marshall test and Superpave Gyratory Compactor (SGC) test. The comparison between Marshall test and SGC test highlights the need to introduce a specific method for measuring the real volumetric properties of the analyzed DAR mixes.