Microscopic experimental and numerical research on rejuvenators: A review

Prompting high content of reclaimed asphalt pavement (RAP) to be used in road building and maintenance has drawn great attention. The application of rejuvenators is an efficient way to ensure the performance of recycled asphalt mixtures. However, as various types of rejuvenators emerging, limited understanding about rejuvenation poses challenges to put effective ones into use. For precisely evaluating the performance of rejuvenators, plenty of studies were conducted to ascertain the fundamental mechanism of rejuvenating from the microscopic view. This paper provides an overview of studies focusing on the change inside asphalt after adding rejuvenators. Chemical compositions of rejuvenators were collected as basic information. Both laboratorial experiments and molecular dynamic simulations were investigated to not only compare the effectiveness of several rejuvenators but also explain the rejuvenating mechanism. Finally, functional groups of rejuvenator structures were comprehensively examined to provide global understanding about how chemical compositions influence the efficacy of rejuvenators. This review highlights that the essential capacity of a true rejuvenator is to disturb asphaltene agglomerations. Besides, the molecular structures of rejuvenators will not only affect their deagglomerating abilities but also the performances of diffusion and durability. It has been found that gel-permeation chromatography (GPC) analysis is effective in evaluating the performance of rejuvenators, while Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) and SARA (saturates, aromatics, resins and asphaltenes) analysis are only suitable for assessing asphalt oxidization. In addition, comparing some tests can only detect changes, molecular dynamic simulation can reveal the mechanism both of data and vision. The results of this work can provide comprehensive knowledge for the evaluation and development of rejuvenators.