Characterization of petroleum pitch using steady shear experiments

Asphalt for highway and runway construction is processed by either air blowing or blending with different petroleum streams. In the blending process, petroleum pitch, a by-product of solvent deasphalting of the vacuum residue is mixed with heavy extract to produce asphalt of the desired specifications. The rheological response of blended asphalt hence depends to a large extent on the constitutive property of petroleum pitch. In an aim to develop robust models for blended asphalt, modeling the mechanical behavior of petroleum pitch hence becomes necessary.In this work reported here, petroleum pitch from crude sources such as Basrah Light, Arab Mix and Arab Light are subjected to steady shear for 99 min at temperatures ranging from 70 to 120 °C for different shear rates. Each of these material exhibited different stress overshoot and decay during steady shear depending on the temperature and shear rate. A viscoelastic fluid model of the rate type is selected to model the response of the material. Using the recent thermodynamic framework based on Gibbs potential proposed by Rajagopal and Srinivasa [27], restrictions on the proposed model are obtained. The rotational flow problem is solved and the material parameters are estimated. The model predictions are corroborated with the experimental observations and they are found to be reasonably good.