130号道路石油沥青 · Bitumen 130# for Severe Cold-Zone Chinese Road Projects

130号道路石油沥青是JTG F40-2004《公路沥青路面施工技术规范》中仅次于160号的最软牌号：验收针入度120–140（0.1mm），闪点≥230 °C，A级蜡含量≤2.2 %，薄膜加热后质量变化不超过±0.8 %。130这个数字是名义针入度，即区间的中点，端点是120和140；A级、B级、C级只收紧蜡含量、低温延度、针入度指数与老化后残留要求，并不改变针入度区间。该牌号主要用于严寒地区路面、表面处治与碎石封层，以及乳化沥青和液体石油沥青的基质沥青。本页对无法核实的指标不作推定，缺项另列一表说明如何补齐。

130# road petroleum asphalt is graded under JTG F40-2004 with a penetration band of 120–140 (0.1 mm). The flash point minimum is 230 °C, wax content for class A is a maximum of 2.2 %, and mass change after thin film ageing is limited to ±0.8 %. The number in the grade name is the nominal penetration at the centre of the band, not one end of it. 130# is the softest grade in the series apart from 160#, and its real uses are pavement in the severe winter low-temperature zones, sprayed surface dressing, and service as the base binder for emulsified and cutback bitumen. Several lines of the standard’s 130# column are deliberately not reproduced on this page, because a guessed limit on a cold-region binder is worse than an admitted gap.

130这个数字指的是中点 · What the 130 in the name actually points at

Under JTG F40-2004《公路沥青路面施工技术规范》, the Ministry of Transport specification for highway asphalt pavement construction, road petroleum asphalt (道路石油沥青) is named by a single number followed by a hash. 130# covers penetration 120 to 140 in tenths of a millimetre, measured at 25 °C with a 100 g load for 5 seconds to method T 0604 of JTG E20-2011《公路工程沥青及沥青混合料试验规程》. The figure 130 is the nominal centre of that band. It is not a limit, and no cargo has to test at 130 to be a compliant 130#.

This convention runs the opposite way to the one most exporters use, and it is the single most common misunderstanding in China-facing bitumen trade. In the ASTM and EN systems the two numbers are the band: 120/150 means penetration 120 to 150 dmm and nothing else. In the Chinese system the one number is the midpoint: 70# means 60 to 80, 110# means 100 to 120, and 130# means 120 to 140. The failure mode is symmetrical and both directions cost money. A trader who reads 130# as a request for material testing at 130 has collapsed a twenty-point band onto a single value and will reject compliant cargo. A trader who reads 130# as 130 to 140 has cut off the lower half of the band and will reject a batch at 124 that the standard accepts without comment.

系列到这里就快到头了 · The series is nearly finished here

Penetration and hardness move in opposite directions, so the grade number rises as the binder softens. Reading down the JTG F40-2004 series: 30# at 20–40, 50# at 40–60, 70# at 60–80, 90# at 80–100, 110# at 100–120, 130# at 120–140, and 160# beyond that. The bands touch rather than overlap — 110# ends at 120 and 130# begins at 120, and material measuring exactly 120 sits on a boundary where the rest of the acceptance table decides which grade it is offered and judged as. A batch is always offered as one grade and assessed against that grade’s complete column, never against the penetration line on its own.

130# is therefore three steps softer than 70#, the Chinese workhorse, and one step from the end of the list. That position matters commercially more than the arithmetic suggests. At 120–140 the material is soft enough that its behaviour in a conventional dense-graded hot mix under real traffic becomes a genuine engineering question rather than a routine one, which is why so much of the 130# that is produced never enters a hot mix plant at all. This page does not state a penetration band for 160#, because that figure is not reproduced here on a basis that can be cited; where a project or a contract reaches past 130#, read the 160# column out of the standard itself.

闪点到这一档不再下降 · The flash point stops stepping down here

One requirement stops moving between these two grades and it is worth noticing. Nothing on this page says where it goes below 130#, because the 160# column is not reproduced here. The Cleveland open cup flash point (闪点) minimum falls as the binder softens — 260 °C for 70#, 245 °C for 90# — and then holds at 230 °C for both 110# and 130#, so it does not step down again between those two grades. That is a useful thing to know when reading an offer: a soft-grade cargo presented with a flash point below 230 °C is not simply a softer product, it is outside the requirement.

The practical consequence is about margin rather than about fire. Neat 130# is nowhere near flammable at any sensible working temperature. But the gap between working temperature and flash point is narrower than the one an operator gets used to on 70#, and a plant that heats every grade to the same ceiling gives that margin away without noticing it. The margin disappears entirely once solvent is blended in to make a cutback, which is covered further down this page.

130号还是AH-130 · Which document is the contract actually written to

Two Chinese standards carry a grade at this softness, they are different kinds of document, and at the soft end of the ladder the confusion between them takes on a particular flavour.

• JTG F40-2004 — issued by the Ministry of Transport as a construction specification. Its subject is how an asphalt pavement gets built, and the binder acceptance table is one clause inside that larger instruction. Grades run 160#, 130#, 110#, 90#, 70#, 50# and 30#, each split into quality classes A, B and C.
• GB/T 15180《重交通道路石油沥青》 — a national product standard, which describes a category of goods rather than a method of construction. Its grades are AH-130, AH-110, AH-90, AH-70, AH-50 and AH-30.

Both series carry a position at this softness level, and they are not the same acceptance table. There is also a naming oddity here that is worth addressing head-on rather than leaving a buyer to puzzle over: 重交通 means heavy traffic, and AH-130 is the softest grade in that standard. The title describes the standard’s scope and quality intent — it is the national standard written for the heavy-traffic road binder category — not a claim that every grade inside it belongs under heavy loading. A very soft binder and a heavily loaded pavement remain a poor combination whatever document the grade is named in. Where a contract names the AH designation, read the AH-130 requirements out of GB/T 15180 rather than assuming they mirror the JTG figures on this page. A contract that says only 130# is incomplete; write either 130号A级，符合JTG F40-2004 or AH-130，符合GB/T 15180, and require the Certificate of Analysis to report against that same table.

等级不改变针入度 · What the quality class changes, and what it leaves alone

The A/B/C quality classification is a China-specific concept with no ASTM equivalent, and it is the part of the Chinese system foreign suppliers most often overlook. The class does not change the penetration band. 130# is 120–140 whether it is A级, B级 or C级. What changes is the tightness of the supporting requirements: wax content (蜡含量), ductility at 10 °C, penetration index (针入度指数) and the residue requirements after ageing.

• A级 — the highest class, permitted for all grades and all pavement layers.
• B级 — permitted for the lower layers of expressways and class-1 highways, and for all layers of lower highway classes.
• C级 — for class-2 highways and below.

On 130# the class question splits along the same line the demand does. Where the cargo is destined for a pavement, the class is the low-temperature argument: ductility at 10 °C and the wax ceiling are the properties a cold-region design is paying for, and they live in the class rather than in the grade number. Where the cargo is destined for an emulsion mill or a cutback blender, the plant’s own product specification governs whatever leaves its gate, and the class it buys is a judgement about the residue it needs to make rather than about a pavement layer it will never see. What must not happen in either case is a seller settling the class on the buyer’s behalf because a soft grade rarely goes under an expressway surface course. The class is whatever the design documents or the plant’s formulation require, and an offer reading 130#, penetration 120–140 has not stated a specification at all.

关于用量的实话 · An honest note on how much 130# actually trades

130# is a minor grade by volume and a buyer is better served hearing that than being reassured about it. Two of the three uses set out later on this page barely register as bitumen trade at all: material drawn into an emulsion mill or a cutback blender is consumed as a plant input and re-emerges under a different product name entirely, so a large part of genuine 130# demand never appears as a paving cargo anywhere. The paving demand that is left is fenced in by geography to the severe winter zones, and thinned further inside them, because a cold-zone road carrying real traffic is normally designed around a polymer-modified binder rather than around a softer plain grade.

The consequences are practical rather than discouraging. Enquiries arrive one at a time instead of as a running programme. Lots are small enough that drummed packing is usually the sensible answer rather than bulk. Price is genuinely hard to benchmark, because too few comparable trades exist to reference it against. And lead time is the variable most likely to catch out a buyer whose instincts were formed on 70#. Specify 130# at design stage, put the grade, class and governing standard into writing early, and treat availability as something to confirm in advance rather than to discover at the point of ordering.

气候分区代码 · The three-part zone code

JTG F40 assigns each location a bitumen performance climate zone (气候分区) written as a three-part code such as 1-4-1 or 2-2-2. Each digit comes from a different meteorological statistic:

• First digit — summer high-temperature zone (夏季高温分区), from the mean maximum air temperature of the hottest month. 1: above 30 °C. 2: 20 to 30 °C. 3: below 20 °C.
• Second digit — winter low-temperature zone (冬季低温分区), from the extreme minimum air temperature. 1: below -37 °C. 2: -37 to -21.5 °C. 3: -21.5 to -9 °C. 4: above -9 °C.
• Third digit — rainfall zone (雨量分区). 1: humid, above 1000 mm. 2: moist, 500 to 1000 mm. 3: semi-arid, 250 to 500 mm. 4: arid, below 250 mm.

The winter digit runs the opposite way to intuition: a lower second digit means a colder winter. Zone 1 is the extreme, an extreme minimum air temperature below -37 °C. Zone 4, above -9 °C, is effectively a mild winter. North-east China and northern Inner Mongolia sit in the coldest winter zones and are the natural home of a binder this soft. The far south is a high-temperature humid environment where 130# has no place as a paving binder at all.

低温开裂的机理 · What the binder is actually being asked to do

Low-temperature transverse cracking is a stress problem rather than a load problem, and nothing heavy has to drive over the road for it to happen. A cooling pavement wants to shrink, the layers underneath hold it where it is, and the shrinkage that cannot take place turns into tensile stress inside the asphalt layer instead. Whether that stress reaches the tensile strength of the mixture depends on two properties of the binder, and moving down the grade ladder improves both at once. The first is the temperature at which the binder stops behaving as a viscoelastic material and begins behaving as a glass; a softer binder reaches that condition further down the thermometer. The second is relaxation — a binder still able to creep bleeds stress away instead of storing it, and in an extreme zone it is being asked to do that through one cooling cycle after another rather than once. When the stress wins, the layer cracks transversely across the carriageway, water reaches the structure through the crack, and everything that follows follows from there. That is why the first crack matters far more than its width suggests.

A design moves down the grade ladder to buy both of those properties at once. How far down it moves is a judgement recorded in the design documents, not a mapping printed in the standard, and this page will not publish a zone-to-grade rule that JTG F40 does not contain. What can be said is the shape of the reasoning: each step towards a softer grade lowers the temperature at which the binder turns glassy and increases how much stress it can bleed away before the layer cracks. 130# is where that argument arrives once the harder grades have already been tested against the site’s extreme minimum air temperature and found wanting. It is a deliberate step rather than a default one, and the reasoning behind it belongs to the project, not to the supplier quoting it.

25 °C的针入度并不能回答低温问题 · Penetration at 25 °C is a proxy, not an answer

This is worth being blunt about, because the whole grade ladder is built on a room-temperature test. Penetration is measured at 25 °C. The failure this page is discussing happens forty or sixty degrees below that. The correlation between the two is real — softer at 25 °C generally does mean less brittle at -30 °C — but it is a correlation across typical materials, not a physical law, and two binders sharing a penetration band can differ materially in how they behave at the bottom of the temperature range depending on crude source and processing route.

That is why the class-dependent lines matter more on this grade than on any other. Ductility at 10 °C (T 0605) is the requirement in the Chinese table that actually reaches towards low-temperature behaviour, and it is one of the properties the A/B/C class turns on. The penetration index (针入度指数), bounded between -1.5 and +1.0, constrains how steeply the binder’s consistency changes with temperature — a binder at the wrong end of that range moves further per degree, which is exactly the wrong characteristic in a place with a wide annual temperature swing. A buyer specifying 130# for a cold-region pavement and checking only the penetration number has verified the least relevant line on the sheet.

夏季的天花板 · The summer ceiling, argued without a number

This page does not state a softening point (软化点) minimum for 130#, and the reason is set out in the omissions table above. The engineering point can still be made cleanly from the direction of the series. The class A minimum falls monotonically as the binder softens: 55 °C at 30#, 49 °C at 50#, 46 °C at 70#, 45 °C at 90# and 43 °C at 110#. 130# necessarily sits at or below that last figure — it cannot sit above it and remain consistent with the ladder.

A binder of that consistency cannot be placed in a pavement that will see high summer surface temperatures under meaningful traffic. It will rut in the wheelpaths, shove at intersections and approaches where traffic brakes and accelerates, and bleed on the surface in the first hot spell. No purchase price justifies that outcome, and a supplier who sells a soft grade into a hot-summer zone because the buyer asked for it has done the buyer no favour.

So 130# only makes sense where the first digit of the zone code is permissive at the same time as the second is severe — cool or moderate summers alongside extreme winters. Where a location combines a hot summer digit with a severe winter digit, no plain penetration grade serves both ends: 70# accepts a winter cracking risk and 130# accepts a summer rutting risk that is far worse. That combination is precisely what pushes Chinese design practice towards a polymer-modified binder, or towards a design justified by measured high- and low-temperature performance rather than by a grade name.

交通量才是真正的门槛 · Traffic loading is the real gate

The climate argument gets a project as far as considering 130#. Traffic decides it. A soft binder placed under heavy axle loads deforms, and no amount of correct cold-weather reasoning changes that. In practice the 130# paving case is a narrow one: an extreme winter zone, a cool summer, a lightly trafficked pavement, and often a thinner structure on a rural, county or local road where thermal cracking rather than rutting is the distress that ends the pavement’s life. Where a cold-zone road carries real traffic, the honest answer is a modified binder or a harder grade with a low-temperature design behind it — not a softer plain grade bought on climate reasoning alone.

第三位数字与喷洒作业 · The rainfall digit, and why it lands differently on a sprayed grade

The third digit selects moisture-damage countermeasures — anti-stripping treatment, filler and aggregate choice, drainage detailing — and casts no vote at all on the penetration band. On most grades that is the end of the matter. On 130# it is not, because so much of this grade is sprayed rather than mixed, and a thin sprayed film is exactly where rainfall stops being somebody else’s clause. In a surface dressing the binder film is the only thing holding the chipping to the road and water has direct access to both sides of it, so a wet zone and a waxy binder compound into something worse than either on its own. That is the concrete reason the 蜡含量 line deserves attention on a seal cargo and not only on a paving cargo.

分区代码要向买家索取 · Ask for the zone code rather than deriving it

This page publishes no city-to-zone table and no zone-to-grade recommendation chart, and the omission is not modesty. A zone code is computed from meteorological records for one specific location and then written down by the design institute; by the time a supplier is asked to quote, it has existed in the project file for months. What is safe to say here is directional rather than coded, and this page says no more than that: the north-east and northern Inner Mongolia are where Chinese winters get severe enough to make a binder this soft an engineering answer rather than a shortcut, and the hot, humid south is where the same binder in a pavement would simply be a defect. Everything between those two poles is settled by the code, so ask the buyer to send it. A code guessed from a city name and a general impression of the weather is a number the seller invented and the buyer will later quote back at them, and on a grade this soft the consequence of guessing low on the summer digit is a rutted pavement rather than an argument about paperwork.

用途概览 · The demand streams in one place

• 表面处治 · Surface dressing — hot binder sprayed onto an existing surface with chippings spread and rolled in. Single, double and triple treatments (单层、双层、三层表面处治).
• 碎石封层 · Chip seals and seal coats — maintenance seals and wearing surfaces on light-traffic roads, including synchronous chip sealing where binder and chipping are applied together.
• 贯入式路面 · Penetration macadam — an older technique in which binder is sprayed into a coarse stone skeleton in stages and never mixed with it, still specified on rural and county work.
• 乳化沥青基质 · Emulsion base binder — the feedstock a mill converts into prime coats (透层油), tack coats (粘层油), fog seals (雾封层), slurry seal (稀浆封层) and micro-surfacing (微表处).
• 液体石油沥青基质 · Cutback base binder — base stock for rapid, medium and slow curing grades (快凝、中凝、慢凝) used for priming and cold-weather work.
• 严寒地区热拌 · Cold-region hot mix — real but narrow, on the conditions set out in the section above: extreme winter zone, cool summer, light traffic.

表面处治为什么要软沥青 · Why a sprayed seal wants a soft binder

A surface dressing is not a structural layer. It is a thin film of binder holding a single layer of stone against the road, and it has to do three things in sequence. At the moment of spraying it must wet both the existing surface and the chipping. Through the first weeks it must hold the chipping against traffic while embedment develops. Then it must survive its first winter without going brittle and releasing the stone.

Each of those pushes towards a softer binder, and the second and third push hardest in a cold region. A stiffer binder chills faster after it leaves the spray bar, which shortens the window between spraying and chipping — and in a cool-climate construction season that window is already short. A stiffer binder also has less capacity to wet an aged, dusty existing surface. And through the first cold season a stiff film is the one that goes glassy and lets go of the stone.

The failure modes bracket the choice on both sides, which is why this is a selection problem rather than a preference. Too stiff, or sprayed too cold, and the result is chipping loss (掉粒 or 剥落) — stone stripping off under traffic, usually starting in the wheelpaths and often within the first season. Too soft, or over-applied, and the result is bleeding and flushing (泛油) — binder rising through the stone in hot weather to leave a slick, shiny, low-friction surface. A 130# used for seal work in a cool region is a bet that the first risk dominates the second. In a warmer region that bet loses.

One further point that is easy to miss when comparing an offer: on a seal, the binder is the only thing bonding the stone to the road, and the film is thin and directly exposed to water. Adhesion is not a secondary property here in the way it can be inside a dense mix, so wax content and the anti-stripping arrangement carry more weight on a sprayed application than the same numbers would on a hot mix cargo.

乳化沥青 · Emulsion, and what the base grade actually controls

In an emulsion (乳化沥青) the hot base binder is dispersed as fine droplets in water containing an emulsifier, using a colloid mill. Cationic, anionic and nonionic systems all exist, and the rapid, medium and slow setting behaviours are produced by the emulsifier chemistry and the formulation rather than by the base grade.

JTG F40-2004 covers emulsified bitumen in its own clause, with its own designations and its own acceptance table, separate from the road petroleum asphalt table this page reproduces. The designation is a letter code and its structure is worth understanding even if you never read the clause: the first letter distinguishes material intended for spray application (P, 喷洒型) from material intended for plant mixing (B, 拌和型), and the second letter gives the charge of the emulsifier system — C for cationic (阳离子), A for anionic (阴离子), N for nonionic (非离子). A buyer purchasing emulsion should be reading that clause and contracting against that table, not this one.

One property does trace back to the base grade, and it happens to be the one still on the road a month later: the residue. Water is a carrier and it leaves; the film that stays bonded to the surface is the base binder, stiffened somewhat by the shear and heat of the mill. So a plant specifies its feedstock by working backwards through a subtraction. Decide what consistency the finished film has to have, allow for the stiffening the process will add on the way through, and the base grade falls out of the difference. Start from a hard base and the residue is harder still — which is why a plant serving prime coats, fog seals and slurry systems in a cold region works from the soft end of the ladder. 130# gets chosen because it leaves the process something to take and still finishes soft.

What the base grade does not control is whether the emulsion is fit for purpose. Storage stability (储存稳定性), sieve residue (筛上剩余量), particle charge, breaking and setting behaviour and residue content are all properties of the emulsion, tested on the emulsion. A perfect 130# certificate says nothing about any of them.

液体石油沥青 · Cutback, and the flash point that collapses

A cutback (液体石油沥青, also 稀释沥青) is base binder blended with a petroleum solvent so that it is liquid at ambient temperature and cures by the solvent evaporating. Curing speed follows the volatility of the solvent, which is why the family is described in rapid, medium and slow curing classes (快凝、中凝、慢凝). Cutbacks are used mainly for prime coats into unbound bases, for tack work and for cold-weather patching, and JTG F40-2004 again covers them in a separate clause with their own designations and acceptance table. Note also that cutback use has been progressively restricted in many jurisdictions on volatile organic compound grounds, and emulsion has replaced it in a great deal of work it once did. Where a project still specifies a cutback, that is a decision for the project documents to make.

130# is a natural base here for the same reason as in emulsion: after the solvent has gone, the residue must still be a serviceable binder rather than an over-stiff film. And here is the safety point that deserves more attention than anything else on this page. The 230 °C minimum to T 0611 on a neat 130# certificate is a statement about bitumen and about nothing else. Blend a petroleum solvent into it and the mixture flashes where the volatile component flashes — hundreds of degrees lower — so the figure printed on the bitumen certificate stops describing what is now in the tank. A cutback is not a thinner version of the same product. It is a different hazard class wearing a related name.

Three consequences follow and none of them is administrative. Classification, safety data sheet, storage, transport and ignition-source control all have to be rebuilt around the blend’s own measured flash point, and nothing written for the neat binder carries across that change. The people handling it have to be told so explicitly, because the drum it came out of and the drum it goes into look identical from across the yard. And the blending step itself — a volatile liquid meeting binder that is hot by definition — is where the risk in this entire chain is concentrated, rather than a tidying-up operation at the end of it. Settle the classification with the party writing the safety data sheet, and with the carrier, before a litre of it is moved.

基质牌号不是成品规格 · A feedstock grade is not a product specification

More 130# is bought as an input than as a finished binder, which is why the most expensive contract error on this grade is naming the feedstock when what was needed was the product. Sort it by asking what actually changes hands. If 130# itself crosses the fence and the buyer’s own mill or blender does the rest, then 130号A级，符合JTG F40-2004 is exactly the right thing to contract for and the formulation is the buyer’s engineering problem. If what the buyer needs is finished emulsion or cutback, the contract has to name that product’s specification and acceptance table, and the base grade demotes to an input the producer selects in order to hit it. Get it the wrong way round and the argument that follows has no villain in it and no clause to fix it with, because the document that was signed is being honoured exactly as written while the job it was bought for cannot be done.

软牌号的储存与取样 · Why the date on the certificate matters on this grade

Two things behave differently once the binder is this soft, and both cost money rather than merely looking untidy. The first is that the packaging is carrying a load it was not really designed for. At 120–140 the material creeps under its own weight in warm weather, so tall stacks lean, drum seams take the strain, and what arrives is harder to release from the drum in one piece. Stack height, shade and ventilation stop being warehouse housekeeping on this grade and become terms worth putting into the storage and stowage arrangements in writing.

The second is that the grade name is perishable, and only in one direction. Heating cycles and long hot storage take penetration off a binder and never hand it back — and 130# has a hard floor at 120 immediately beneath it, with 110# waiting on the other side of that line. A batch made near the bottom of the band can therefore arrive as perfectly sound material carrying the wrong grade on its paperwork: usable in a plant, non-conforming on a certificate, and close to unarguable once it has been discharged. The controls are unglamorous and they work: hold long-term storage temperature down, cut out avoidable reheating, and time the sampling that supports the Certificate of Analysis to the loading rather than to whenever the material was made. Feedstock buyers should look hard at the shape of that problem in particular, because their plant cares about the residue it can make while their contract cares about a number falling inside a band — and the sampling date is usually where those two part company.