• Bitumen
• Air-Blowing

The term ‘bitumen’ is referred to refined bitumen, a hydrocarbon product produced by removing the lighter fractions (such as liquid petroleum gas, petrol and diesel) from crude oil during the refining process. The term “straight-run” refers to bitumen that is produced direct from the vacuum distillation process, without any further modification.
Petroleum residues are frequently blown with air to modify their physical and rheological properties and so to adapt them to special applications. Compared with straight-run bitumen, blown bitumen has a low penetration rate and a high softness point (harder bitumen). As blowing is such a versatile tool of adjusting the rheologic properties of bitumens, it is employed on a large, still increasing scale. This explains the lively interest in the blowing process, its chemistry and technology. Hard bitumen under controlled temperature conditions is widely used as an anti-slip layer compound in the piling industry, for the manufacture of roofing felts, the roofing and waterproofing industries and more.
This thesis work is part of a collaboration between the MOPI s.r.l. laboratory in Pisa and a company in Trento, Menestrina©, which operates in the bitumen sector. Menestrina© has designed an innovative air-blowing unit for bitumen (called Oxyboost) that does not replace the existing systems, but represents an additional element to improve performance. Menestrina© has provided us with a small laboratory unit with a capacity of 6.5 Liters, with the aim of verifying its correct functioning and providing them with data on the influence of process parameters on the severity of air-blowing. The process parameters investigated in this thesis are Temperature, Pressure, Air and Bitumen Flow.
In addition to this, we conducted measurements and analyses to ensure that the bitumen used undergoes the processes reported in the scientific literature. In particular, we carried out measurements of density and viscosity; FT-IR (in ATR mode), Elemental, IATROSCAN (TLC-FID) and Thermogravimetric Analyses (TGA) on the blown bitumen obtained with Oxyboost.