Introduction. Pavement bitumen is one of general road construction materials that are used for pavement construction. The quality of bitumen binder regulates specific technical and operational characteristics of asphalt pavements and their durability
Problem Statement. Nowadays in Ukraine only one refinery plant produces pavement bitumen. The volume of its production is not enough to completely satisfy the demands of Ukrainian road construction industry. Due this a lot of binders in Ukraine are imported from other countries. In recent years the highest volumes of bitumen was imported from Republic of Belarus and Poland. In 2020 the amount of road construction works was increased, particularly with pavement repairing and new pavement constructing. It resulted in increasing in need in pavement bitumen that led not only to the high volume of import bitumen but to an expansion of the list of importing counties.
Purpose. The presented study is aimed on analysis of quality of bitumen imported in Ukraine from eight countries. For these binders their features are obtained and problem of their applicability and its advisability in Ukraine road industry is considered.
Materials and methods. As a material of research bitumens produced in Azerbaijan, the Republic of Belarus, Greece, Spain, Italy, Poland, Turkey and Ukraine are chosen. The standard quality properties are obtained in accordance with the actual in Ukraine standards ДСТУ 4044 and ДСТУ EN 12591. Beside this the attention is paid to the finding of fundamental properties of these binders, such as adhesion, cohesion and viscosity.
Results. With the experimental data it is found that all bitumens significantly differ in their structural type. It results in differences in softening point and breaking point temperatures at the equal penetration value (this difference is in the range from 4.5 °С for the closer values to 16.5 °С for the most distinct values). This fact can influence on asphalt pavement properties and durability. Besides such a difference in a temperature susceptibility of binders their adhesion and cohesion properties differ too. Bitumen that tends to sol type of structure is characterized with higher cohesion and viscosity values. This peculiarity must be taken into account in mixing and compaction operations for the asphalts with such bitumen. The temperatures of these operations must be higher than one for bitumen close to the gel type. The low temperature susceptibility and wide plasticity interval are the advantages of bitumen that tends to gel type of structure.
Conclusions. All bitumens that are imported in Ukraine must be certificated with ДСТУ 4044:2019 national standard requirements. Also they must be tested with additional methods to validate the decision on their implementation in road construction industry and to specify the implementation area.
