The Physical and Engineering Properties of 80/100 Bitumen with Carbon Black Additive

Nowadays, the road pavement faced more challenging environment i.e. increase in loadings and temperature. Due to that, the demand for better pavement to withstand all the harsh condition also is increasing. In this report, one of the constituent of the flexible pavement i.e. the bitumen is being focused on to be improved. The selected bitumen grade is 80/100 bitumen. Further elaboration of project including the background, problem statement, objective and scope of study will be explained in the Introduction section. The bitumen’s physical and engineering properties are investigated after mixing it with 4 types of carbon blacks with different concentration (measured by percentage by weight of the bitumen). The properties of bitumen and carbon blacks are described in Literature Review section. The laboratory tests done to complete this project are penetration test and softening point test and further describe in Methodology section. The result for penetration and softening point test, in summary, shows increment on the softening point values (still within specification range) with the same penetration value as penetration value of the virgin bitumen. The details of the results are described in Result and Discussion section. For the conclusion, the presence of carbon black in the bitumen does improve the properties of the bitumen i.e. the increment of softening point values which indicates that the bitumen can improvise its defense against the problem such as rutting. The increment value of Penetration Index (PI) also further confirms the improvement of bitumen after added with carbon black. Several recommendations to make this research better are also given in Conclusion and Recommendation section.