Investigation of Rutting Resistance and Moisture Damage of Cold Asphalt Mixes

Cold-mix asphalt (CMA) is considered a convenient and rapid solution for pavement pothole repair projects. Despite the wide use of CMAs, reliable procedures for quality control and screening of different types of these mixes are still not available. This paper studies and compares the engineering properties, permanent deformation, and moisture resistance of nine types of CMAs. For this purpose, three different well-known experiments, namely Marshall stability, indirect tensile strength (ITS), and Hamburg wheel-tracker (HWT) tests, were performed on each oven-cured and ambient-cured CMA sample. The results mainly showed that the rutting resistance of densely-graded CMA samples is considerably higher than that of the open-graded samples. The dust-to-binder ratio seems to have a high correlation with the moisture susceptibility of dense-graded CMAs, whereas the percentage of coarse aggregates plays an important role in that of open-graded CMAs.