PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD In the summer months, most cities are significantly hotter than nearby suburbs and rural areas. This difference is largely due to asphalt pavement, which absorbs heat much more readily than grass or soil. Now, researchers at the University of Rhode Island (URI) are looking to collect that wasted energy and use it for much more useful purposes.
Graduate
student Andrew Correia and Professor K. Wayne Lee measure the amount of solar
energy absorbed by asphalt (source: URI Department of
Communications & Marketing).
"We have mile after mile of asphalt pavement around the country, and in the summer it absorbs a great deal of heat, warming the roads up to 140 degrees or more," said project lead K. Wayne Lee, a URI professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering."If we can harvest that heat, we can use it for our daily use, save on fossil fuels and reduce global warming."
Here are four possible techniques that the URI researchers have identified:
● Wrapping flexible photovoltaic cells along Jersey walls and highway medians might be one of the simplest solutions for collecting solar heat from the roadways. Cells could also be added to rumble strips and shoulder lanes. Such solar devices could collect energy to power streetlights and illuminate road signs.
"This is a project that could be implemented today because the technology already exists," said Lee. "Since the new generation of solar cells is so flexible, they can be installed so that regardless of the angle of the sun, it will be shining on the cells and generating electricity."
At URI, a pilot program of this method is already being used to power streetlights around campus.
● In a second practical approach, engineers could install pipes of water below roadways. The water, heated by the sun, could be pumped beneath bridges and used as an alternative to road salt. Since sodium chloride salts are harmful both to wildlife and to our freshwater drinking sources, an environmentally friendly substitute is welcome. The heated water could also be used to warm buildings or move turbines in power plants.
Hoping to prove that such pipes could work in a real-world setting, Andrew Correia, a URI graduate student, has been building prototypes with funding from the Korea Institute for Construction Technology.
"One property of asphalt is that it retains heat really well," Correia said, "so even after the sun goes down, the asphalt and the water in the pipes stay warm. My tests showed that during some circumstances, the water even gets hotter than the asphalt."
● Another method of harvesting the energy in asphalt is to use the thermo-electric effect to generate power. Here, semiconductors form a circuit linking a hot spot and a cold spot. The temperature difference can generate a small amount of electricity.
According to URI Chemistry Professor Sze Yang, thermo-electric materials could be embedded at different places in the roadways—some in sunny spots, others in the shade. With several such systems installed together, the electricity generated could defrost the roadways. Yang proposes the use of organic polymeric semiconductors, rather than traditional semiconductors. Polymeric semiconductors are flexible and inexpensive.
"This is a somewhat futuristic idea, since there isn't any practical device on the market for doing this, but it has been demonstrated to work in a laboratory," said Yang. "With enough additional research, I think it can be implemented in the field."
● The final and most theoretical method proposed by the team is to replace the country's asphalt roadways with power-generating materials. Such futuristic roads would be made from big, resilient electronic blocks equipped with photovoltaic cells, LED lights and sensors. Such roads could generate electricity, create illuminated, interchangeable lane divisions, and alert engineers of maintenance concerns.
Currently, such technology is too expensive for applications anytime soon. For example, a group of engineers in Idaho made a single driveway out of the blocks for a total cost of over $100,000. The URI researchers envision that the parking lots of corporations, which have the money to fund such projects, could be the first implementation of the electronic blocks.
"This kind of advanced technology will take time to be accepted by the transportation industries," Lee said. "But we've been using asphalt for our highways for more than 100 years, and pretty soon it will be time for a change."
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