In the road industry, the pressure to shift towards more environmentally-friendly development processes has fostered a growing focus on recycling techniques. This approach is not new, but its novelty lies in the recent trend to maximize the use of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP). Furthermore and for long time mixing plants have been improved to introduce more and more high percentage of RAP. The pressure with sustainable development and the possibility to increase the RAP use have increased the RAP mix design study requirements. With this latter, many questions have been raised such as what is the right laboratory method? How does the RAP binder influence the performance of the final mix?

This article mainly deals with the last query and gives some answers regarding to the final mix properties. Base course mix design has been chosen and tested with different RAP contents and then has been compared to the traditional base course asphalt concrete. Then asphalt concrete performances have been compared to the binder stiffness modulus, itself taking into account the RAP and the new binder. One of the first finding is that RAP binder mobilization has an influence on the final property of the asphalt concrete performance.

RAP, binder, stiffness modulus