A Review of Aggregate and Asphalt mixture Specific Gravity measurements and their Impacts on Asphalt Mix Design Properties and Mix Acceptance

Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA) mixtures rely on stone-to-stone contacts among particles to resist applied forces, and permanent deformation. Aggregates in SMA should resist degradation (fracture and abrasion) under high stresses at the contact points. Current practices for asphalt mix design and acceptance testing rely on volumetric properties. Vital to the calculation of mix volumetric properties are specific gravity measurements of the mixture and the aggregate in the mixture. For the Motorways wearing course,SMA stone grid must fulfil the mineralogical-petrographic condition to be on rock of igneous and/or metamorphic origin but of silicate composition, specific weight and LA method on resistance to fragmentation. During the construction of the Kosovo motorway for wearing course was used the SMA as asphaltlayer for providing longer lifetime to the road construction. The super-pave mix design for SMA wearing course has been composed considering the available stone with high mineralogical and petrographic composition. The stone used for the wearing course on this motorway has resistance to crushing of LA =18 which is below the standard criteria for heavy traffic roads and motorways wearing courses. Thespecific weight of used stone was 3100 kg/m3which is about 15% heavier than standard weight. For this specific stone were prepared special super-pave design mix with binder content 4.5% which was well below than typical SMA composition of 6.0âˆ'7.0% binder rather of mixture was 3100 kg/m3. In this paperwork it is described the design mix of SMA composed with relatively high specific weight and their impacts on asphalt mix design properties used in Kosovo Motorway.