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,

371 visitors in 4 days

The Blog is now 4 days in the air. It can not be found via Google yet, but still we have had 371 visitors from different countries. Below is the top 10 list.

Self Healing Asphalt on YouTube

Alvaro explains how it works on YouTube

How the Self Healing Works:

In the new asphalt that is developed in this project small steelwol fibers are mixed in the bitumen. After some time (probably a few years or after a strong winter like we have now) when small microcracks occur in the bitumen and when the aggregates in the asphalt mix at the surface start to debond, the steelwool fibers are heated with induction energy. By heating up the fibers the bitumen will melt and close the cracks and repair the bond with the aggregates. It is important not to apply too much heating, because that would close all the pores in the porous asphalt.

The induction technique will be further developed and optimized in this project bij partner INTRON.

Self Healing Asphalt on A58

Saturday December 11 was an important day for the self healing asphalt. The concept which is the outcome of the IOP project SHM0617 “Unravelling of Porous Asphalt” is used in a full scale application. On the Dutch highway A58 near Vlissingen a section of 400 meter had to be renewed. Rijkswaterstaat, always willing to try new inventions, offered the road to science. The self healing porous asphalt developed by the Microlab and the Road Engineering lab of the Civil Engineering faculty of Delft University was used. Contractor Heijmans, also partner in the IOP project, took care of making the asphalt and placing it on the road. Partner INTRON will take care of the healing process by using an induction machine to heat up the steelwool fibers that are placed inside the material. Alvaro Garcia and Erik Schlangen, members of the developers-team , went in spite of the cold weather to Zeeland to shoot some pictures.