Self-Healing Concrete (with Bacteria) and Self-Healing Asphalt (with Steel Wool)

Infrastructures cover a very broad spectrum of different materials. This presentation focuses on civil engineering structures, concrete and asphalt in particular. The public demand for such infrastructures is high level of service and performance, high durability and minimum negative ecological impact. New emerging self healing materials science provides solutions to the problem. An overview is given of new developments obtained in research on self healing of cracks in cement based materials and asphalt concrete. At Delft University various projects are running to study self healing mechanisms. The first project that is discussed is Bacterial Concrete, in which bacteria are mixed in concrete, that can precipitate calcite in a crack and with that make concrete structures water tight and enhance durability. In a second project hybrid fibre reinforced cementitious materials are studied that can mechanically repair cracks when they occur. The last project described in this paper is on the ravelling of porous asphalt concrete and how to heal this damage by incorporating embedded microcapsules or steel fibres. The state of the art results in all projects show that self healing is not just a miracle, but materials can be designed for it.