Taking advantage of crumb rubber from waste tires to modify bitumen is widely for the environmentally friendly and sustainable development of pavement. This study investigated the modification mechanism, rheological, and aging properties of styrene–butadiene–styrene (SBS)/desulfurized crumb rubber (DCR) composite modified bitumen (SBS/DCRMB). Morphological features and chemical characteristics were assessed by fluorescence intensity measurement and gel permeation chromatography (GPC), respectively, and results demonstrated that the DCR and SBS modifier in SBS/DCRMB had been vulcanized and formed a three-dimensional network structure. Moreover, a comparison of the GPC elution curve showed the residual bitumen hardly changed due to carbon black released from DCR of SBS/DCRMB during the aging process of SBS/DCRMB, and the polymer molecules condensed to larger units. However, the remaining bitumen in SBSMB had changed evidently and the polymer degraded to smaller molecules. Meanwhile the rheological testing results, including multiple stress creep recovery, linear amplitude sweep and bending beam rheometer, declared that the SBS/DCRMB is superior to SBSMB before and after aging.

The performance of Styrene-butadiene-styrene (SBS) modified asphalt is closely related to the content of SBS modifier. In the production process of modified asphalt, a certain amount of additive such as sulfur and rubber oil may be added to reduce the segregation and promote the swelling of the polymer, but the effect of these additives on determining SBS content in asphalt is not yet clear. This paper presents the calibration curves of SBS content based on rutting factor and creep slope and points out its defects according to the temperature scanning test and the bending beam rheometer test. Subsequently, using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) for rapid determination of polymer content in SBS modified asphalt based on orthogonal test and then the effects of additives such as asphalt type, SBS content, rubber oil and sulfur on the accuracy of polymer content determination by FTIR were investigated. Moreover, in the orthogonal tests of adding sulfur and rubber oil, the multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was firstly used to analyze the additives influence on the test accuracy of FITR. Results indicated that the influencing degree of different additives is different. The influence of sulfur on the determination accuracy is greater than that of rubber oil. Therefore, the rapid determination method needs further improvement.

Nanoindentation has been applied in the field of asphalt mixtures, but, at the nano-scale, changes in the composition of the mixture and material properties can have a significant impact on the results. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate the feasibility of nanoindentation tests on different types of asphalt mixtures with different gradations and the influence of material properties and test methods on nanoindentation results. In this paper, the nanoindentation test results on three kinds of asphalt mixture (AC-13, SMA-13, and OGFC-13) with different aggregate gradations were investigated. The load-displacement curves and moduli obtained from the nanoindentation tests were analyzed. In addition, nanoindentation tests were carried out before and after polishing with different ratios of filler and asphalt (RFA) (0.8–1.6). On this basis, the morphology of asphalt specimens with different RFAs is observed by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) imaging. The results indicate that using the nanoindentation test to characterize the mechanical behavior of asphalt mixture, the confidence level of the dense-graded mixture is low, and non-dense-graded mixtures are used as much as possible. Moreover, results illustrate that the nanoindentation modulus tends to increase as the RFA increases. and the SEM chart shows that the higher the mineral powder content in the mastic, the more complex the bitumen and mineral powder interaction surface, confirming the influence of mineral powder content on the nanoindentation test results. Furthermore, the effect of polishing is almost insignificant.