Developing maturity methods for the assessment of cold-mix bituminous materials

► A maturity function was developed for conditioning effects on cold-mix materials. ► A correlation between maturity and stiffness was identified. ► Method was applied to assess climatic effects on cold-mix pavements in service. Cold-mix bituminous materials offer a sustainable, cost effective alternative to traditional hot-mixes. Difficulties however can be encountered when specifying cold-mix materials due to the strong influence of time and temperature on material performance. In the field of concrete technology maturity methods are routinely used for assessing materials of known curing history. This research presents the development of a maturity approach for the assessment of cold-mix bituminous materials and its application for predicting the effect of climatic variations on in situ mixture performance. A strong correlation was observed between the calculated maturity and the measured stiffness for a range of conditioning temperatures and durations thus enabling the prediction of long and short-term material performance in situ where ambient conditions are known.