Development of a performance catalogue of asphalt surfaces for road pavements

Nowadays road construction has to satisfy essential requirements like safety and eco-compatibility of traffic, especially from the standpoint of paving surface properties. For the time being, the satisfaction of these needs is based more and more on performance parameters (friction, evenness, bearing capacity, vibrations, noise, etc.) and relative benchmarks. To facilitate this quality system to work properly, it is necessary to specify and characterize the functional relationship between composition, production and performance indicators. These problems are the basis of the proposed research program, whose target can be identified as the conception and development of a systematic catalogue of wearing courses in which the relationship between mix-composition and production, pavement construction techniques and performances are fixed and specified with adequate reliability. In order to allow the drawing up of such a catalogue, a test program on a selected set of bituminous admixtures for road surfaces was carried out. At the end of the project (December 2003), the results were reported and the Authors proposed an integration of the catalogue itself with further inter-laboratories collaboration.