Penetration Bitumen / Pavement Interactive
- Penetration Grade Bitumen is a standard bitumen usually used as a Paving Grade Bitumen essential for road construction and for the production of asphalt pavements with superior properties, and it's very important once it bounds the aggregates and creates a unique cohesion and stability to the bituminous mix.
This grade of Bitumen is mainly used in the manufacture of hot mix asphalt for bases and wearing courses. - Penetration grade bitumen forms the basis of other road binders such as cutbacks, emulsions, and polymer-modified binders, which are all discussed below.
Bitumen grades are specified primarily in terms of their needle penetration (referred to as 'pen'). Soft bitumens have high pen numbers and hard bitumens have low pen numbers. Within specifications, however, there are certain other criteria which must be met including softening point, solubility, and resistance to hardening. Descriptions of these test methods, which form the basis for most bitumen specifications, now follow. - The penetration of bituminous material is its consistency expressed as the distance in tenths of a millimeter that a standard needle penetrates vertically into a specimen of the material under specified conditions of temperature, load and duration of loading. Grades of straight-run bitumen are designated by two penetration values, for example, 40/50, 60/80, 80/100 etc.; the penetration of an actual sample of the bitumen in any grade should fall between the lower and upper value given
Grades of Bitumen Penetration
The most popular grades are; grades 30/40, 40/50, 60/70, 80/100, 85/100 and 160/220. We are also capable of producing other grades of Penetration Bitumen upon request by our customers.