ElaStiLe asphalt binders

Mayca Rubio-Cámez, Director of LabIC.UGR, explained that the over-arching focus of their work is on sustainable, automated and intelligent asphalt pavements (MASAI), particularly understanding the performance of different asphalt binders, how they impact road pavement performance, sustainability and the digitisation of intelligent roads.

LabIC.UGR collaborates with more than 60 administrations and companies around the world on its international research projects, which include CirCoPav (Circular and Connected Pavement for Carbon Neutral and Digitalised Roads) – a project with a global research network spanning countries, universities and companies in three different continents.

Mayca’s colleague Professor Fernando Moreno Navarro then stressed the importance of understanding asphalt binder performance under real service conditions, before he introduced a new term, “ElaStiLe” (good Elasticity, good Stiffness and Ductile - good, ‘active’ Ductility) for binders which offer the best performance in the different pavement layers.

He added that traditional laboratory tests can potentially lead to a misunderstanding of the real performance of asphalt binders, then presented some novel tools that can help establish clear differences between binders under different traffic, temperature and ageing conditions.

After a lively Q&A session which featured many questions from Eurobitume member company representatives, Eurobitume Technical Committee Chair Véronique Ducreux (ExxonMobil) closed the webinar by thanking Mayca and Fernando for their interesting and insightful presentations and looking ahead to further academia webinars in 2023.