ABSTRACT
Oxidative aging is a complex phenomenon in bitumen and its fundamental understanding is needed to optimize paving materials with long-lasting characteristics. This research reports on a diffuse-reaction model for predicting the oxidation of bituminous binders over time and under different conditions. As known, the oxidation of bitumen is affected by the material chemistry, film thickness and temperature. Thus, these factors were considered in this research to simulate the oxidation of a thin bitumen film. Carbon compounds were assumed as the oxidation index of a model bitumen and analyses were performed enabling prediction of chemical compositional changes. In the future, the current model can be used to simulate the actual oxidative aging in (un)modified binders, such as epoxy modified asphalt, presented in a companion paper (Apostolidis et al., Kinetics of Epoxy-Asphalt Oxidation. AM3P).
