Long term conditioning is performed on compacted asphalt mixtures.

• A. True
• B. Not specified
• C. Unknown
• D. False

Answer: (D)

Long-term conditioning is about aging that happens over years in service, mainly through the binder oxidizing in the presence of air at elevated temperatures. In practice, aging tests for long-term effects are applied to the asphalt binder itself (for example, with a Pressure Aging Vessel) or to a loose mix to simulate aging before compaction. Doing long-term conditioning on a compacted asphalt concrete specimen would mix the aging of the binder with the already-set aggregate structure in an uncontrolled way, making the results hard to interpret or reproduce. Therefore, long-term conditioning is not performed on compacted asphalt mixtures.