In today's era, bituminous mixes are often used in pavement construction
globally. Design of these pavements is a multi-step process of choosing
binders and aggregate materials and quantifying them to provide a
suitable mix taking into the effect of external factors such as traffic
loading and climatic conditions. As the traffic intensity is
exponentially increasing and the variation in temperature is rising, the
need to think of an alternative solution for improvement of pavement
characteristics has cropped up. These problems have a damaging effect on
the preferred properties of bituminous pavement, such as flexibility,
resistance to fatigue, resistance to rutting and raveling. It is caused
by gradual build-up of irrecoverable strains under repeated loading,
which develop into a measurable rut (permanent depression along the
wheel path). These strains are due to the visco-elastic response of
bituminous materials to dynamic loading. Unmodified bitumen lacks the
balance between the visco-elastic response and the increase of the
traffic volume. Therefore, binders were modified to face the load and
weather challenges.