Iranian Researchers Use Engine Oil Waste for Production of Asphalt in Road Paving
“Nearly 20,000 tons of waste material is produced from engine oil refining every year, and this waste is known as acid sludge and consists of sulfuric acid, vehicle engine chips, burnt polymers and some used engine oil,” said Alireza Aliakbari, a PhD student of the Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Amirkabir University of Technology.
Noting that the simple and efficient method settles the problem of the engine oil refining industry and the obtained product can replace a part of the asphalt mixture production materials, he said that it improves the properties of asphalt mixture against rutting damage, and the humidity sensitivity and temperature cracking will reduce.
“In the final step, in order to ensure the sanitary disposal of this waste in the road structure, pollutant emission environmental tests were made, and the emission factors were lower than the maximum permissible limits with a significant confidence interval,” Aliakbari said.
He described choosing a simple and accessible method of acid waste neutralization by lime and the use of the obtained neutralized product as a substitute for stone materials in the production of asphalt mixture as achievements of this research.
In a relevant development in April, an Iranian researcher and PhD student at Amirkabir University of Technology studied the fatigue performance of asphalt mixture in different scales.
“Due to the high volume of traffic, the asphalt of high-capacity roads are subjected to severe vehicle loads which lead to the formation of fatigue cracks. Fatigue is one of the most common reasons for the failure of asphalt which is affected by various factors like the specifications of asphalt, granulation of stone materials and bitumen,” said Mojtaba Khodadadi, a PhD student in Civil-Transportation Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology.
“The main goal of this research was to investigate the fatigue performance of asphalt mixture at different scales so that the performance of the final mixture can be understood by having information at low scales,” he added, noting that comparison of the lifespan of different scales of asphalt mixture was another goal of this project.
“Also, in this project, the ability of numerical modeling in predicting the performance of asphalt mixture and optimization solutions to reach a solution closer to the laboratory results were investigated,” Khodadadi said.
“Asphalt paving, optimization of asphalt mixture compositions and more accurate life cycle cost analysis by using the information obtained from the multi-scale method were among the results of project,” he stated.
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