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