Evaluating the effect of aging on adhesion for hot-poured road sealants through a modified adhesion test

• A new modified adhesion test by considering cyclic temperature effect is proposed. • The cyclic temperature effect is simulated through 3 hot-cold cycles. • The total dissipated energy is proposed to evaluate the effect of aging on sealant adhesion. Due to the influences of installation and field environment, the adhesion failure usually occurs during the actual application of sealants. But current specification methods do not adequately consider the installation aging and field cyclic temperature effect on the adhesion of sealants. Hence, a new modified adhesion test method was proposed to quantitatively evaluate the effect of aging on the adhesion of three types of sealants. The cyclic temperature effect was simulated through 3 hot-cold cycles and the aging during installation was modelled through the short-term thermal aging. Based on the modified adhesion test, an evaluation method and 3 evaluation indexes were proposed to quantitatively evaluate the adhesion of sealants. Further, based on energy method, total dissipated energy ( E t ) was proposed and used to quantitatively evaluate the effect of aging on sealant adhesion. Then the aging indexes of several evaluation indexes were proposed to analyze the effect of aging on the adhesion of sealants. Finally, a comparison was made between current specification bond test and the modified adhesion test and the advantages of modified adhesion test were demonstrated. The results show that short-term aging had a significant weakening effect on the maximum tensile stress ( σ n ) and made the tensile separation stiffness ( K n ) of different sealants change irregularly. The conventional adhesion evaluation index, growth rate of tensile separation stiffness ( G s ), is not suitable for evaluating the effect of aging on sealant adhesion. Compared to G s , the E t index reflects the accumulation of dissipated energy during the whole test process, and improves the stability of the overall evaluation. The evaluation index E t and the corresponding aging index AI E were recommend to quantitatively evaluate the effect of aging on sealant adhesion. Due to the effect of short-term aging, the adhesion of three types of sealants under the cyclic temperature effect decreases by 15%∼35%. One recommend that the effect of short-term aging should be considered in the adhesion evaluation of sealants.