A new pooled research fund to promote transport infrastructure innovations has been created under the ERA-NET Plus Infravation 2014 Call.
The Infravation 2014 Call addresses the road transport challenges identified by the European Commission for the near future. Concretely, it aims at promoting cost-effective advanced systems, materials and techniques in road infrastructure construction and maintenance, including repair, retrofitting and revamping.
In order to achieve those goals, the Call brings together funding from the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, USA and the EU.
In this sense, the HEALROAD proposal has become one of the projects beneficiaries of the grant. HEALROAD represents a preventive maintenance action which will develop a research to further improving the induction heating technique for self-healing asphalt materials. This technique has been only developed in recent years especially in The Netherlands. The research will focus on some unknown parameters which need to be quantified:
- Chemical aspects of the bitumen affecting its capacity to flow through micro cracks
- Effect of aging on the healing capacity of the asphalt mixes
- Maximum lifetime extension of the asphalt mixture
- Optimum moment for healing in the lifetime of the road
The project will last 30 months and consortium expects to optimise the technique, reducing its costs (i.e. by using steel grits or other recycled materials instead of fibers) and also facilitating its business implementation.
The consortium is composed of six European partners with different profiles and coordinated by the University of Cantabria (Spain): University of Nottingham (UK), Heijmans (The Netherlands), SGS (The Netherlands), BASt (Germany) and ERF (Belgium).
For further information, please contact José Díez [email protected]
