They would feature heating elements that work on electricity

Dec 2, 2009 12:00 GMT  ·  By

At this point, there are only a handful of methods to clear a road that has been covered with snow. There is the old-fashioned way, which involves you going out there with a shovel. Or you could wait for the snow plough or the salt truck. If you live in specific countries, your government may have already installed heating pipes underneath to prevent snow from settling in the first place. The salt truck is arguably the most effective, but it produces runoffs that basically eat at the road, causing it to degrade over the course of several winters.

Pipes, on the other hand, are terribly difficult to maintain, and, if they break, the road needs to be torn apart to fix them as well. The snow plough and the shovel work ineffectively, in that snow immediately sets back on the freshly cleaned surface. Aware of these things, researchers at the University of Houston, in Texas, are working on a new approach to eliminating snow, which is to make use of electrical contacts embedded within the road itself. When electrical current is passed through these circuits, they heat up, causing the snow to melt without corroding the tarmac itself.

It is a bit ironic that a state such as Texas, which has little to suffer from snow, should come up with such an innovative approach to clearing the world's roads. The scientists in charge of this investigation propose that one possible method of heating the concrete would be to pepper it with electrically resistive materials since the production stage. This would essentially allow an entire freeway to act like the elements of a kettle. In scale models, the method proved effective, but the tarmac took some time before it heated, NewScientist reports.

In order to fix this, the researchers moved from the fly ash compounds that they were using to augment the concrete, and started using sheets of carbon nanofibers. These turned out to be far more efficient in terms of the time they took to heat up, the team reveals. Field tests showed that heating a piece of road from -10 degrees Celsius to 0 degrees Celsius took less than two hours. But the kicker is that the entire process consumed only six Watts of electricity. An average household lightbulb consumes between 40 and 100 Watts. “It's an interesting technique, but scaling it up to cover whole roads will require enormous power,” Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) engineer Derek Carder believes.