Abstract

Since the 1960s, Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA) pavement surfaces have been used successfully in Germany on heavily trafficked roads as a durable road surfacing to resist wear from studded tyres. Because of its excellent performance characteristics, road authorities in Germany as well as major European Countries quickly adopted SMA as a standard wearing course. During the last few years, SMA has become one of the most popular asphalt pavements. The deformation resistant capacity of SMA stems from a coarse stone skeleton providing more stone- on-stone contact. Improved binder durability is a result of higher bitumen content, a thicker bitumen film, and lower air voids content. This high modified-bitumen content as binder also improves flexibility. In this paper SMA-14 using Oil Palm Fruit Ash (OPFA) used as binder was studied in the laboratory. Some tests include Marshall Stability and Flow, indirect tensile resilient modulus (MR) test, Static Uniaxial Creep test, Wheel Tracking test, and static immersion and boiling water, as well as drain down test were conducted, and the results show that SMA-14 resistant to rutting, fatigue cracking, have high Marshall stability compare to the conventional dense graded asphalt mixtures.

Keywords: SMA, excellent, performance, high resistance, fatigue, rutting