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(Hammer)

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(Laughter)

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(Microwave beeps) (Laughter)

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You probably all agree with me

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that this is a very nice road.

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It's made of asphalt,

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and asphalt is a very nice material to drive on,

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but not always, especially not on these days as today,

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when it's raining a lot.

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Then you can have a lot of splash water in the asphalt.

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And especially if you then ride with your bicycle,

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and pass these cars, then that's not very nice.

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Also, asphalt can create a lot of noise.

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It's a noisy material,

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and if we produce roads like in the Netherlands,

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very close to cities, then we would like a silent road.

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The solution for that is to make roads

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out of porous asphalt.

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Porous asphalt, a material that we use now

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in most of the highways in the Netherlands,

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it has pores and water can just rain through it,

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so all the rainwater will flow away to the sides,

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and you have a road that's easy to drive on,

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so no splash water anymore.

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Also the noise will disappear in these pores.

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Because it's very hollow, all the noise will disappear,

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so it's a very silent road.

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It also has disadvantages, of course,

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and the disadvantage of this road is that raveling can occur.

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What is raveling? You see that in this road

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that the stones at the surface come off.

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First you get one stone, then several more,

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and more and more and more and more,

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and then they -- well, I will not do that. (Laughter)

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But they can damage your windshield,

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so you're not happy with that.

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And finally, this raveling can also lead to more and more damage.

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Sometimes you can create potholes with that.

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Ha. He's ready.

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Potholes, of course, that can become a problem,

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but we have a solution.

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Here you see actually how the damage appears in this material.

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It's a porous asphalt, like I said, so you have only

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a small amount of binder between the stones.

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Due to weathering, due to U.V. light, due to oxidation,

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this binder, this bitumen,

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the glue between the aggregates is going to shrink,

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and if it shrinks, it gets micro-cracks,

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and it delaminates from the aggregates.

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Then if you drive over the road, you take out the aggregates --

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what we just saw here.

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To solve this problem, we thought of self-healing materials.

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If we can make this material self-healing,

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then probably we have a solution.

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So what we can do is use steel wool just to clean pans,

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and the steel wool we can cut in very small pieces,

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and these very small pieces we can mix to the bitumen.

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So then you have asphalt

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with very small pieces of steel wool in it.

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Then you need a machine, like you see here,

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that you can use for cooking -- an induction machine.

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Induction can heat, especially steel; it's very good at that.

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Then what you do is you heat up the steel,

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you melt the bitumen,

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and the bitumen will flow into these micro-cracks,

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and the stones are again fixed to the surface.

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Today I use a microwave because I cannot take

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the big induction machine here onstage.

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So a microwave is a similar system.

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So I put the specimen in, which I'm now going to take out

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to see what happened.

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So this is the specimen coming out now.

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So I said we have such an industrial machine in the lab

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to heat up the specimens.

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We tested a lot of specimens there,

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and then the government, they actually saw our results,

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and they thought, "Well, that's very interesting. We have to try that."

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So they donated to us a piece of highway,

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400 meters of the A58, where we had to make

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a test track to test this material.

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So that's what we did here. You see where we were making the test road,

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and then of course this road will last several years

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without any damage. That's what we know from practice.

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So we took a lot of samples from this road

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and we tested them in the lab.

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So we did aging on the samples,

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did a lot of loading on it, healed them with our induction machine,

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and healed them and tested them again.

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Several times we can repeat that.

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So actually, the conclusion from this research is that

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if we go on the road every four years

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with our healing machine -- this is the big version

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we have made to go on the real road --

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if we go on the road every four years

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we can double the surface life of this road,

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which of course saves a lot of money.

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Well, to conclude, I can say

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that we made a material

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using steel fibers, the addition of steel fibers,

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using induction energy to really

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increase the surface life of the road,

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double the surface life you can even do,

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so it will really save a lot of money with very simple tricks.

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And now you're of course curious if it also worked.

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So we still have the specimen here. It's quite warm.

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Actually, it still has to cool down first

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before I can show you that the healing works.

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But I will do a trial.

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Let's see. Yeah, it worked.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)