UMass prof. awarded $250K for asphalt study

DARTMOUTH – Walaa Mogawer, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, has received $249,785 from the New England Transportation Consortium for research on “Hot Mix Asphalt Mixture Containing Recycled Asphalt Shingles” to further study in the area of pavement material construction.
According to a UMass Dartmouth release, the rising cost of asphalt mixtures has become a challenge for transportation agencies operating with limited budgets, and creating cost-effective and environmentally friendly mixtures is especially challenging.
The goal of Mogawer’s research is to evaluate plant-produced asphalt mixtures that contain recycled asphalt shingles to identify the critical material properties needed to produce recycled mixtures as strong as or stronger than typical mixtures.
Currently, only between 10 percent and 15 percent of reclaimed materials are used to build roads, UMass said. Taxpayers already save more than $1.5 billion per year by recycling asphalt, and another $1 billion could be saved each year if the nearly 10 million tons of shingle that currently go into U.S. landfills were recycled.
Mogawer serves as the director of the UMass Dartmouth Highway Sustainability Research Center, bringing more than 20 years of experience in pavement design, maintenance and rehabilitation to the project. He has previously served as principal investigator on several research projects funded by MassHighway, the New England Transportation Consortium and the National Science Foundation.
The New England Transportation Consortium is a research cooperative jointly administered by the transportation departments of the six New England states.

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