Self Healing Aspalt on the A58

On this Blog we will give info on the test track with Self Healing Asphalt that is built on the A58 near Vlissingen in The Netherlands. The Asphalt is a special type of ZOAB (very porous aphalt concrete) containing small steelwool fibres. A known but serious problem with ZOAB is ravelling: stones at the surface coming off in time due to microcracking in the binder. The special ZOAB that is developed at Delft University (sponsored by AgentschapNL) can be heated with induction energy due to the fibres that are present which closes the microcracks and with that extends the service life of the road.

Sunday 30 January 2011

Self Healing Asphalt in Technisch Weekblad

The 'Technisch Weekblad' published an article (in Dutch) on the self healing asphalt. Click on the image to read the article.

Wednesday 26 January 2011

Asphalt core under induction machine

The image below shows an asphalt core (left) and the same core heated under the induction machine (right). The right photo is taken with our infrared camera. It can be clearly seen that the induction heating primarily heats up the bitumen (with the steel wool fibers) and not the aggregates. In the infrared image the aggregates are darker, which means the temperature is lower.

Monday 24 January 2011

Core Drilling


Today the road was inspected and 120 cores have been drilled from the road. The road survived the cold days with ice and snow perfectly. No damage or even small cracks could be observed.








The cores will be tested in our lab. We will perform mechanical tests to measure the indirect tensile strength. The cores will be scanned in our CT-scanners to measure the fibre distribution. Part of the cores will be aged in the weather-o-meter and we will apply induction heating to the samples to test how fast heating is possible.


The results of the tests will be put on this blog when available,

Thursday 20 January 2011

Front cover of DCMat newsletter

The newsletter of the Delft Centre for Materials DCMat has also an article on our asphalt this month.


This is the link to the newsletter.

TU DELTA article on self healing highway

The weekly newspaper DELTA of Delft University published an article today on the self healing highway. Click here to read the article.

Tuesday 4 January 2011

Asphalt core heated with induction energy

At the right you can see an asphalt core with steelwool fibers that is heated op to 120 oC under the induction machine in the laboratory. The image is taken with our infrared camera.

The team added


There is a new page added to the blog on which the people are introduced that are responsible for the development of this self healing asphalt.

Brochure on Self Healing Asphalt

Rijkswaterstaat (Dutch Government) published a brochure on self healing asphalt and roads. Our self healing asphalt with steelwool fibers is described in this report as one of the very good options. Another project we are working on now (also sposored by AgentschapNL) is the use of capsules filled with rejuvenator inside the bitumen. This project is also described in the brochure. You can download it here. The brochure is both in Dutch and in English. Happy reading.