Estimation of binder quantity in a binary blend of asphalt binders using FTIR

In the process of asphalt recycling, blending among two or more binders takes place; however, the binders may not necessarily undergo a ‘complete’ blending while the recycled mix is produced in the plant. In the present work, two types of binders are blended at various known proportions and effort is made to estimate the extent of blending through chemical analysis. For the chemical analysis the Fourier-Transform Infrared (FTIR) Spectroscopy is used in the present work. One binder is taken as the virgin binder, and the other one is taken as the aged binder recovered from Reclaimed Asphalt Pavement Materials (RAPM). Carbonyl and the sulfoxide functional groups are used as indicators to study the extent of blending. It is envisaged that such an approach can possibly be used for quantitative analysis of blending of binders in the actual asphalt recycling process.