The Nottingham Asphalt Tester (NAT) is equipment used for rapid determination of modulus, permanent deformation and fatigue of

bituminous Bitumen ( , ) is an immensely viscous constituent of petroleum. Depending on its exact composition, it can be a sticky, black liquid or an apparently solid mass that behaves as a liquid over very large time scales. In American English, the m ...

mixtures. It uses cylindrical specimens that are cored from the

highway A highway is any public or private road or other public way on land. It includes not just major roads, but also other public roads and rights of way. In the United States, it is also used as an equivalent term to controlled-access highway, or ...

or prepared in laboratory. These

mechanical properties A material property is an intensive property of a material, i.e., a physical property or chemical property that does not depend on the amount of the material. These quantitative properties may be used as a metric by which the benefits of one mate ...

are essential to people involved in the production of roads and the development of materials used in road construction. NATs are used across the world by materials testing laboratories, universities, oil companies, regional laboratories, contractors and consulting engineers. The NAT was invented in the 1980s at the

University of Nottingham The University of Nottingham is a public research university in Nottingham, England. It was founded as University College Nottingham in 1881, and was granted a royal charter in 1948. Nottingham's main campus (University Park Campus, Nottingh ...

by Keith Cooper, who later founded Cooper Research Technology Ltd.

References

Asphalt Construction equipment Materials testing Pavement engineering Pavements University of Nottingham {{civil-engineering-stub