Here in Canuckistan, along with much of the US and Europe, it’s winter, and that means very little motorcycling due to buildup of ice and snow on the roads (and also because some people think it’s too cold—wimps!). But what if the pavement was designed to melt ice and snow on contact, without damaging your vehicle?
That’s what researchers funded by China’s Hebei Provincial Transportation Department have designed. Currently, regions with snow generally use plows to clean up after a storm, with salt and sand spread to melt ice and provide traction. Other options include heating the road surface to melt snow (very expensive) or even designing a road surface with chloride solutions built into the pavement mix, to melt snow as it lands on the blacktop.
For many areas, the heated road surface option is impractical, and elsewhere, the plows and salt/chloride spreading and treatments are not only harmful to the pavement itself, they’re incredibly hard on vehicles, as they’re constantly coated in a brine when driving in bad weather. Also, current baked-in chloride treatments don’t have the longevity needed to make them practical. As a possible answer, the research from Hebei Provincial Transportation Department uses a new non-chloride solution to avoid corrosion damage and last for a longer time period. As per a write-up from the American Chemical Society:
The researchers prepared a sodium acetate salt and combined it with a surfactant, silicon dioxide, sodium bicarbonate and blast furnace slag — a waste product from power plant operations — to produce a fine powder. They then coated the particles in the powder with a polymer solution, forming tiny microcapsules. Next, the team replaced some of the mineral filler in an asphalt mixture with the microcapsules.
In initial experiments, a pavement block made with the new additive lowered the freezing point of water to -6 F. And the researchers estimated that a 5-cm-thick layer of the anti-icing asphalt would be effective at melting snow for seven to eight years. A real-world pilot test of the anti-icing asphalt on the off-ramp of a highway showed that it melted snow that fell on the road, whereas traditional pavement required additional removal operations. Because the additive used waste products and could release salt for most of a road’s lifetime, the researchers say that is a practical and economic solution for wintertime snow and ice removal.
A very cool idea, although it’s hard to see rural North American municipalities sinking big funds into repaving sections of road with this treatment. and it would certainly take years of successful trials to convince engineers and government transportation czars to buy into the idea (or maybe not—the wheels of government funding have a funny way of being greased into unusual new ideas, with the lubricant of money into the right poclets… ).
If effective, it would certainly make sense to use this tech on expensive infrastructure like bridges, at least. Can motorcyclists hope for a future where life in the snow belt is merely a matter of dressing for the weather, with no thought as to traction-reducing ice buildup? We won’t hold our breath, but it sure would be nice.
