Article on Delft Innovation Award in Volkskrant

Tomorrow is the final of the Delft Innovation Award. Today the Volkskrant (Dutch newspaper) had an article on the innovations in Delft. The Porous Network Concrete seems to be one of the main candidates to recieve the award...... We will be back tomorrow with the results of the contest.

KIVI-NIRIA annual conference

Last week the Dutch association for engineers KIVI-NIRIA organised their annual conference. The theme this year was smart materials. Our group organised a session on innovative building materials. In this session we focussed on different self healing projects. The presentations are available for download on the website of KIVI-NIRIA

Porous Network Concrete beam tested

Last week Senot tested some of the beams made with Porous Network Concrete. The beams have a core of porous concrete that can be used to inject a self healing agent and repair cracks. The beams are tested in 3-point bending. After the first loading a self healing agent (in this case epoxy containing fluorescent dye) is manually injected into the porous core.

In a real application the epoxy can be a cement grout and the injection can be automatic after the cracks have been found by embedded sensors.

The internal porous core is filled completely by the epoxy as can be seen in the image of a cross section below:

After injection of the epoxy the specimen is again loaded in 3-point-bending. The specimen is much stronger now and new cracks are formed as shown in the figure below. This photo is made after the tests when the specimen is cut. It clearly shows that the crack that is formed during the first loading is filled completely with epoxy. The new cracks from the second loading step are not filled.

First project using Bacterial Concrete

Close to Breda in the Netherlands a pavilion is made in which self healing Bacterial Concrete is applied.
Read more about this project (in Dutch) in the article below or go to the website of cementenbeton.nl

Upscaling in Progress

To conquer the world we have to do some upscaling of our self healing agents. Most probably it is not enough yet, but we are making progress.

Porous Network Concrete runs for Delft Design Award

This year Delft University has again a competition for the Delft Design Award. The idea of Porous Network Concrete was submitted to the competition. A video of the concept in which Senot is the main actor can be viewed on YouTube.
Click here to watch the video.

More Capsules for Bacterial Concrete

In addition to the existing bacteria-based healing agent immobilized in expanded clay particles, multiple alternative healing agent products are currently being developed.

A Delft, les materiaux s'autoreparent

In Delft, materials are Self Healing, that is the title of the article in the French Journal
L'USINE Nouvelle that was published in June about the self healing research at Delft University.

Click on the image to read the full article.

Baterial Concrete goes to Germany and Korea

Virginie Wiktor gave last week a presentation (look at the literature & videos page for the paper) on the Bacterial Concrete project at the 4th International Conference on Crack Repair in Dresden, Germany.

At this conference people from KEPRI, the Korean Electric Power Research Institute, attended Virginies presentation and got very enthousiastic about the topic. She is now invited to give a special lecture on bacteria-based concrete at the end of this month at the International Workshop of Structural Life Management of Underground Structures which will be held in Daejeon, Korea.

Sodium Silicate Solution for Self Healing

"Application of sodium silicate solution as self-healing agent in cementitious materials"

was the title of the paper by Haoliang Huang and Guang Ye at the Rilem conference in Hong Kong a few weeks ago.

Below you see an image from the presentation that Haoliang gave.

For the complete presentation and article go to the Literature & videos page.

new capsules for asphalt

Jun Feng Su, our specialist in making capsules succesfully made some capsules with rejuvenator inside for self healing of asphalt that are thermally stable.

Below you see some images of the capsules under the ESEM. In the inset graph you see how the capsule perform in the TGA.

MSc thesis Daniel Janssen

Last week Daniel Janssen defended his MSc-thesis on
"Water encaspulation to initiate self healing in cementitious materials"

you can download the thesis by clicking here or from the Literature & videos page.

RILEM conference Hong Kong

Last week the anual RILEM week was organised, this time in Hong Kong. During the conference Erik presented the work of RILEM TC 221 (Self Healing of Cement Based Materials). If you were not there you can download the presentation here.

more specimen shapes

Senot increased the number of different specimens in the Porous Network Concrete project.
We now have cylinders of different size, plates but also small beams with a tube of porous concrete inside.
More on this project can be found in the page "Porous Network Concrete". Furthermore a presentation can be downloaded from the "Literature & Videos" page.

strange equipment in Microlab

Maybe you have visited our Microlab before. You will have noticed that we have a lot of equipment to test cement based material. Since a few weeks some very unusual equipment can be found. We are not sure yet what Henk Jonkers is doing with this. He says that he needs it for making Bacterial Concrete.....

 

Article in Ingenia

Henk was interviewed in March by The Royal Academy of Engineering in London. The interview was published in Ingenia, their online magazine. The article gives more insight into the Concrete with Bacteria.

You can download the article here.

Self Healing Concrete Workshop 17-May-2011

This is not an announcement.... for that it is too late. But on May 17th 2011 we had a workshop on Self Healing Concrete that we organised for our sponsors (AgentschapNL, DCMat and STW) and our inductrial partners. Below you can find the program of the day. Maybe you missed it..... But the good thing is, that you can download all the presentation from this BLOG. Go to the 'Literature & Videos" page and you will find a link to the presentations at the bottom of this page.

The Workshop would not have been possible without a grant from DCMat.

Bacterial Concrete in the news in Japan.

We spotted this article with a photo of Henk Jonkers while testing a piece of Bacterial Concrete.
So probably the article is also about self healing of concrete with bacteria. However, we are not complete sure......

Interview with Henk Jonkers on BBC

End of last year Henk gave an interview for BBC radio on Bacterial Concrete.
Follow this link to listen to the interview.
The part on the Bacterial Concrete starts after about 15 minutes and 30 seconds into the show....

Henk is also a TV-star....On the "Literature and Videos" page you see some examples.

Self Healing Concrete in COBOUW

In a special issue "Beton in Beeld" of COBOUW (in Dutch) an interview with Erik Schlangen on the developments of Self Healing Concrete was published recently (June 2011). Below a copy of the article is shown. If you click on the image you get a somewhat bigger version and you might be able to read it......in Dutch.

Stamps on "Bacterial Concrete"

Did you know that you can buy stamps with the Bacteria that we use in our Bacterial Concrete.

The Dutch Society of Microbiologists had their 100th anniversary and to cellebrate this Stamps of different species of Bacteria were given out. The Bacteria we put in our concrete are on one of the stamps.

Self Healing Asphalt

Did you know that we have a separate BLOG on Self Healing Asphalt?
On this page you can find all the info on the development of this material and the application in a Dutch Highway A58.

Go to  http://www.selfhealingasphalt.blogspot.com/  to read all about it.

3rd Int. Self Healing Materials Conference, Bath, UK

End of June was the 3rd int. conf. on Self Healing Materials in Bath UK. Our group was represented by 9 people (2 faculty members, 4 Post Docs and 3 PhD students). Try to find them all in the picture below.

We had 1 keynote lecture (by Henk Jonkers), 5 regular presentations and 2 poster presentations. In total we had 10 articles in the proceedings. You can find the extended abstracts on the "Literature & Videos" page.

Major update of Blog...

This week we finaly did a major update of our Blog on Self Healing Concrete. The project descriptions are updated (although more info will follow in the coming weeks).
The "Literature & Videos" page is made up to date. You can find there a lot of publications by our group (some of them can be downloaded). Furthermore you can watch some interesting videos.
The page "Who is Who" had some new faces and you find all the e-mail addresses of all the self healers in our group.
In the page "Self Healing Materials" you will find a link to the old and new booklet on self healing materials published bij AgentschapNL.