27 March 2018 | Nice, France

The final conference of HEALROAD was held on 27 March within the framework of the Pavement Preservation and Recycling Summit (PPRS2018) in Nice (France).

Partners of the consortium unveiled final results of the research which were in line with the objective of the PPRS: maintenance, modernisation, adaptation of roads & streets for tomorrow’s mobility.

HEALROAD had a dedicated session gathering more than 100 participants. Initial presentations from the consortium described the analysis of the asphalt healing technique at the laboratory and the industrial upscaling and demonstration at the duraBASt facility in Germany.

Partners focused on the last phase of the research which started in July 2017 with the construction of the HEALROAD section and continued until February 2018 with the monitoring of the self-healing technique performance. Concretely, the final phase of the project consisted on the deployment of the accelerated loading test (Mobile Load Simulator MLS30) that simulated a real traffic flow scenario able to create the first cracks. At that moment, the road was ready to initiate the HEALROAD induction heating process to self-heal initial cracks with the SGS machine brought from The Netherlands.

In parallel to the tests on the road, cost and environmental impact of the HEALROAD asphalt mixtures was also analysed and final results were unveiled to the public in Nice.

Regarding the economic performance, analysis concluded that despite a slight increase of initial costs in +2%, road managers could benefit of lower costs for renewal measures in between -27% to -21%. Additionally, costs caused by extra travel time, fuel consumption, C02 emissions and accidents in sum can be reduced between -11% / -24 %. In total, it is estimated a total saving of costs in around 4%.

The environmental analysis compared a HEALROAD section with a conventional one  considering a 30-years analysis period and 6 different stages of the road life: production, road construction, leaching, maintenance, congestion and end-of-life. In total, the HEALROAD technology was proved to have a better performance against a conventional mixture in 14 of the 17 midpoint impacts and in all the endpoint impacts.

27 February 2018| Milan, Italy

The ALTERPAVE Project demonstrated how road constructions can reduce the use of natural resources by introducing alternative materials such as RAP and by-products in asphalt mixes. The demonstration took place on a real road in Milan (Italy).

The consortium, co-funded by INFRAVATION and combining EU and USA expertise, initiated the project in 2015. The technical team composed of five partners has developed an integrated approach for the sustainable construction of roads focusing on circular economy and considering the whole life cycle of the infrastructure.

The final workshop gathered experts from industry, research centres, universities and governments who will also be the main beneficiaries of the final results of the project. Presentations focussed on the description of the project, including the initial research on the laboratory by University of Cantabria (Spain) and Western Research Institute (USA), technical validation by VTI (Sweden) and Impressa Bacchi (Italy) and the final sustainable and environmental analysis by ACCIONA (Spain).

ALTERPAVE, together with other research initiatives, shows a clear commitment from the road infrastructure sector to improve its environmental performance while maintaining highest level of quality of the pavement for the end user. In addition, the industry fully supports this vision which is helping to modernise and adapt the sector to new socio-economic and environmental patterns.

01 November 2017 | Cologne, Germany

On 26 October, the HEALROAD Project presented the latest results of its research on self-healing asphalts during a workshop held at the German Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) in Cologne, Germany.

Although self-healing is a promising engineering technique, additional research, is still needed in terms of technical specifications to achieve market deployment.

The workshop in Cologne, which gathered around 60 international experts, presented the latest scientific and technical developments on five specific parameters towards improving the self-healing technique, initially created by the University of Delft:

• Bitumen properties
• Induction heating time
• Maximum heating temperature
• Effect of ageing and successive damage-healing series
• Up-scaling/recyclability of the mixture

The project’s ultimate objective is the development of a technique which ensures the best value for money and resource efficiency as well as improving traffic management by reducing the number of roads closed for maintenance. The research took place in Spain, the Netherlands and United Kingdom while the full scale demonstrator (i.e. construction, testing, healing) is being deployed at the new duraBASt facilities in Germany.

For further information, please contact José Díez: j.diez@erf.be