Project description
Paving the way for asphalt bio-recycling
Used to surface roads, airports and parking lots, asphalt pavement can be 100 % reused. However, there's a massive obstacle: the dependence on using fossil fuel-based materials as binders, recycling agents and engineered polymers. The EU-funded REcircularPAV project will explore the feasibility of using biomaterials (used along with asphalt pavement recycling) to minimise the use of virgin aggregates and petroleum bitumen for asphalt pavements. The technology will be investigated at laboratory level and upscaled to assess operational issues during plant manufacturing and laying processes. As a training-through-research project, REcircularPAV will engineer cost-effective circular asphalt mixtures for road pavement. The mixtures will be assessed in terms of ageing behaviour and environmental and economic impact.
Objective
"A methodology to implement sustainability in road pavement engineering is offered by the circular economy main principle of replacing the conventional linear model for product design and consumption with a circular one ""based on sharing, leasing, reuse, repair, refurbishment and recycling, in an (almost) closed loop, where products and the materials they contain are highly valued"". In this sense, the road pavement sector offers a great opportunity, in fact the asphalt material is generally considered 100% reusable, however, despite several efforts towards the use of total asphalt recycling have been made over the past 30 years, a massive constraint still exists: the dependance on using fossil fuel-based materials as binders, recycling agents and engineered polymers. It’s within this context that part of this consortium (UNIPA, EIFFAGE) have participated in the first-of-its-kind project “BioRePavation 2015 - 2018” (http://biorepavation.ifsttar.fr) aiming at investigating the feasibility of using bio-materials, used along with asphalt pavement recycling, to reduce the use of virgin aggregates and petroleum bitumen for road pavements. BioRePavation showed that bio-asphalt mixtures can have even superior performances to conventional asphalt mixtures, however they still include products derived from oil and are two times more expensive. These limitations can be overcome with REcircularPAV, a training-through-research project aiming at engineering cost-effective circular asphalt mixtures for road pavement in a fossil fuel-free society, incorporating very high-content of reclaimed asphalt together with end-of-life tyres and bio-based materials. The technology will be investigated at laboratory level and upscaled to assess operational issues during plant manufacturing and laying processes. Once the mixtures are engineered, predicted performances will be assessed in terms of mechanical properties, aging behavior and environmental and economical impact."
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringwaste managementwaste treatment processesrecycling
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsfossil energypetroleum
- engineering and technologyindustrial biotechnologybiomaterials
- social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicssustainable economy
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringtransportation engineeringhighway engineering
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
90133 Palermo
Italy