Use of Asphalt Paved Surfaces For Solar Heat 110
vg30e writes "It seems that a company in the Netherlands has found a way to use asphalt paved surfaces as solar heat collectors. Flexible tubes under the surface of the road collect heat from asphalt pavement using water as the working liquid. The heated water is stored underground for later use in defrosting the road, or heating buildings. With all the miles of highway in the continental US, this might be a viable way of collecting massive amounts of thermal energy."
Old idea from Universty of Chicago (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Old idea from Universty of Chicago (Score:4, Insightful)
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There's no patent on the screwdriver, but people still make money selling screwdrivers.
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It's an interesting idea. There are a lot of factors to weigh in, and the primary one is cost - odds are pretty good that doubling the initial cost of construction of a freeway this way won't result in nearly that much savings on maintenance (even accounting for less resurfacing, potholes, and salt spraying) down the line.
Then there's the fact that having a pump fail anytime during the cold season would almost certainly result in the destruction of the surface, unless there's some sort of way to engineer
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I'm sure each of you have felt the "bounce" of a big truck passing you by....why not create some sort of mechanical compression layer that absorbs the effect of cars going over the road section.....it then converts this into a small amount of electricity.....probably most effective on highways and heavily travelled city streets.
And, on top of that, it would still allow for some thermal collection since it would be a different layer.
Layne
Using bouncing energy usually backwards (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're usually sucking energy FROM poorly maintained oil driven vehicles and putting it TO a grid that at least hypothetically could be powered by nuclear or wi
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Use the heat differential to power a Stirling cycle heat engine that gives energy to the road vehicles.
Benefits:
#1: Decreased stopping distance: Force sensors in the roadway can detect when the vehicle is decelerating, and simply multiply that force * 3.
#2: Decreased emissions. Heat->electricity means no emissions.
#3: Synchronizes vehicle speeds. The system can be set up to only provide power to vehicles that are moving the proper speed.
And no, that wouldn't necessarily b
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Another idea could be mixing iron into the top
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Already in place. (Score:2)
This could help safety also... (Score:3, Interesting)
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That said, this is another solution in search of a problem; I can't imagine that it would be even remotely economical to embed tubes in asphalt during construction. Then, remember how roads get cracks in them? That's gonna tear you
Just don't let the roads freeze. (Score:1)
That said, using the roads as solar collectors isn't that bad an idea in general. Roads cover a significant amount of square footage, which is left mostly vacant most of the time (outside of cities). May as well use that space for something the rest of the time.
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It sounds like an interesting idea to me that should be explored but if it turns out to double or tipples the costs of the road, there there might be a problem. We are having trouble paying to maintain them now. And as for generating energy, if it is three times as expensive as traditional methods, then it would be waisting money again. And by energy, I'm not just talking about electricity or heating large buildings with hot water or something like t
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It isn't an inability to pay, or even a difficult time finding the money, it's that people wo
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Cement (Score:2)
*Here, they use asphalt to fill in potholes.
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There's another source of heat in addition to the solar input. Passing vehicles emit heat from the exhaust (including the catalytic converters) and there's heat built up from the mechanical stresses, 'specially the "big
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Yes parts of Texas can get down right chilly Even Dallas can get a bit nippy.
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(You just happened to catch me reading the GP and I thought, oh, someone replied. )
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Tim
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In the county where I live in upstate NY, the Republicans have had a majority since the early 80's, and we use asphalt for paving and repairs on all of the county roads. In the surrounding counties, the Democrats use a mix. It's interesting how politics affect so many things that you wouldn't think of.
Name names, asshat.
I've never seen a road patched with dissimilar materials, nor could I imagine it being done for any reason other than cost. In Albany we've got a bundle of cobblestones under the roads, so we get cracks no matter what we put down. In Oneida, I lived on a gravel-and-tar road for ten years, that got a new "top coat" every year or two.
And I lived a few years in Saratoga County --which has a Republican Majority -- and found the roads to be as crappy as they were in the rest of the state.
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How nice for this bridge. (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry for that link to Treehugger, they are a black hole of links and I would not normally link, but they had the best English language article I could find in 3 seconds of googling.
Nothing new... (Score:4, Informative)
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These are systems initially installed for the express purpose of keeping a large parking area and driveway clear of snow, which some more innovative people have taken to using for production of hot water as well during the summer.
Seasonal energy storage (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea of storing heat in the summer and cold in the winter is viable technically. The capital costs are impressive though. To keep my house cool over the hot summer months would take many cubic yards of ice. The container would be very expensive but maybe not more than most people are willing to spend on an in-ground pool.
It could work. Cheap energy allowed us to forget things we used to do. Expensive energy would cause us to bring them back. The ice box, in some form, could easily return.
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Which is why you use the ground [wikipedia.org] instead. It spends all winter getting cool and remains cooler than the air in summer; it spends all summer getting warm and remains warmer than the air in winter.
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The idea of storing ice is that you have to pump much less water. You could do the thing in the ot
This is called a heat pump (Score:4, Insightful)
Energy efficient meme (Score:4, Funny)
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"We're going to take all that heat and put it into, what I like to call, a 'Locked Box'".
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I thought of this before you... (Score:3, Interesting)
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Why do you empty it in the fall? Treat it well when you're done for the season, and you don't have to blow 15-20-30,000 new gallons in the spring.
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Freezing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Dan East
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Bacon, what can't it do? Re:Freezing? (Score:2)
Has anyone projected our energy needs to 2
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As for turning roads into eclectic generators, I'm willing to be that it would cost a lot more then you could ever recover from it. This idea is actually pretty old. But this doesn't mean we shouldn't study it to see if recent advances in tech make it more pract
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Do they get in the way loop detectors used in the. (Score:2)
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If the tubes are nonferrous (which they'd likely be), they wouldn't cause a problem. However, if the pavement contained these tubes, it would preclude adding a loop detector after teh fact unless you can build the detector into an added top layer, which may reduce the tube system's effectiveness.
Broken pipe (Score:2)
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4 minutes MTBF.
KGO morning Traffic report: "We've got quite a back up on 101 northbound, they've been chasing a leak in lane 3 for 2 weeks; hopefully they'll find it, and we can get back to using the road as a - um - road thingy."
Operating costs are often the unthunk Achilles heel. -almost as bad as opportunity cost, and cost of risk.
AIK
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Interestingly enough, it might increase the lifespan of the road by keeping it at a more constant temperature.
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It will work very well... (Score:2)
Farmer (Score:1)
There's this farmer out in the middle of nowhere, and one day the government decides they need to run a high way through his farm. They make a proposition to buy the needed land (not the entire farm, mind you), and he says okay, under one condition: That he be able to run pipes under the high way, and do whatever he wants with them. The government, not sure of his intentions, but thinking there's not much harm in it, says okay.
What the
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What the farmer did, was run pipes from under the highway, right into his hous
Wow, What a Great Idea (Score:2)
It is time consuming enough when the local DOT decides to start digging up roads. Imagine if they had to lay miles of pipe under it too! Please put this in the recycle bin and move on to the next idea. This one has s
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According to the article, this 'flawed' engineering appears to work in an area that doesn't get a lot of sunny days. That tells me that the engineers involved are far from drunk.
Note that it collects heat in the warm season to be used in the cold season. A jackhammer or backhoe applied to the road or parking lot collectors wouldn't have much impact on the heat already stored. (They could, however, cut off gas lines and underground power lines, a flaw in 'modern' heating systems.)
Now the potential for fre
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My employer does this sort of thing for a living (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a link to our supplier's page with installation photos for those curious. http://www.invisibleheating.co.uk/photos-of-asc-installation-g.asp [invisibleheating.co.uk]
The pipes are filled with anti-freeze rather than water. We use a vegetable based anti-freeze because of it's non toxicity should it leak.
The system is divided into zones, or sections which converge to a manifold. Each zone can be turned off individually, so if someone does damage a section of pipe, it can be turned off without affecting the rest of the system. Anyone who has underfloor heating should have this in place too.
We combine the system with geothermal heating and cooling using boreholes. In the summer excess heat from the building, and from the road is 'dumped' into the boreholes raising the average temperature of the local ground. In the winter we abstract the stored heat which then lowers the temperature back down. The entire system is 'closed loop'. We don't touch the groundwater itself at all, although we do also install open loop geothermal systems.
Inside the building is a heat pump, which (as stated above) works like a fridge, but in reverse. Its basically just a Copeland compressor. It takes in large quantities of water at ground temperature, say 12 degrees C, and compresses that heat into a tank of water (heating it to say 45-50 degrees C) and the water that returns to the ground will exit at something like 6-8 degrees C. Different systems are designed to work with different temperature gradients, so be aware that those are simply example numbers. The larger the difference in temperature, the more efficient the system which is where the road energy comes in. Storing the excess heat in the summer means for example the average ground temp isn't the aforementioned 12 degrees C it's 15 degrees C instead.
A more layman style description can be made using orange squash. Imagine you have a large volume of orange squash. If you find a way to remove some of the orange dilute from the squash you end up with a weaker orange squash, and a volume of orange concentrate. The heat pump works on this idea, except with heat instead of orange squash.
On the whole, systems are surprisingly economical for commercial customers. In the UK installing a geothermal heating system will generally have a payback period of around 5 years when compared to a natural gas boiler. The extra benefit is that you also get almost free cooling with the system whereas with a gas boiler you have to put in extra chiller units. As a final economic litmus test...we are installing a road energy and geothermal system for a small medical centre in the UK ultimately paid for by the NHS, and I'm sure even those outside the UK know the NHS is pretty frugal. ;)
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> A more layman style description can be made using orange squash. Imagine you have a large volume of orange squash...
I was having trouble following the process because I am unfamiliar with this "water" material you used in your example. Thank goodness you gave
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Thank you for your pedantry.
As a side note: Anyone with an allergy to citrus may at their own discretion substitute the orange squash in the analogy with any other form of diluted drink of preference.
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Re:My employer does this sort of thing for a livin (Score:1)
i thought about this a few months back (Score:4, Interesting)
How hot does the water in the pipes get? Is it hot enough that if you swapped out alcohol for the water, the alcohol would turn to steam? (78.3 degrees C) Obviously the surface gets pretty damn hot but does that get through the asphalt into the pipes efficiently enough....
If so has anyone thought of running a nearby stirling engine to generate actual electricity?
My thoughts on this were that in a place like California or Nevada, where there are hundreds of thousands of miles of roadway and at least half a year of near cloudless skies, quite a bit of energy could be generated with little or no additional impact on the environment.
If enough energy was generated you could conceivably even run some public transportation on these roads using an exposed contact system such as a recessed rail... or just run a system parallel to the roads. The cost of transporting the energy to these locations for this use would have dropped to zero thereby making them much more economical.
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This is the type of thing that once a proof of concept has been delivered and the on-going costs have been derived from a 5 year testbed... it gets rolled out in a massive way as a long term integrated project.
See I'm thinking of millions of miles of piping laid down as pre
Very old Paul Theroux concept (Score:2)
Hot Asphalt (Score:2)
Re:May as well bring back steam trains (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, the construction costs will be high, but that's what a lifecycle cost analysis is for.
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Sometimes common sense should apply and there's none in this plan.
a) Huge capital costs for construction. You need new asphalt for all the replacement roadways, and THEN, you need all of the materials for whatever you are carrying the water in. Then you have to transport it to whoever is going to use this heat.
b) Bad allocation of resources. One of the most pressing needs in any part of the world, even the United S
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b) so don't use drinking water then. Rain water will suffice just as well. Oh, and in the Netherlands, there's a lot of rain _and_ water.
I think if t
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Actually, I'd think that they'd prefer to use distilled water with antifreeze agents added. Keeps the system from crudding up.
But I think that the point remains - despite water shortages, a system that you only have to fill up once isn't that big of a deal.
Most shortages are only during certain periods and in limited areas - while fairly expensive you could truck this wat
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So the city, by fixing that leak, could easily afford the water to fill the road piping system.
Can't you just admit you're wrong? (Score:3, Insightful)
First, you have no idea what the capital cost of construction will be.
Second, the GP already said "that's what a lifecycle cost analysis is for." Duh.
Third, you have no idea how much water will be used. It will almost certainly be more than millions of gallons. Four hundred people use a million gallons of water in a day, for personal
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And how long are those pipes going to remain unclogged?
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You just spout words without understanding or any attempt at honest communication, just to try to sway people to your beliefs. It's disgusting to watch, like a retarded chimp flinging poo at passers by.
The arguments you've made are unconvincing. I'm sorry. I'd rather have a milli
You're no engineer (Score:2)
The thing is, the person you responded too said that more study was needed. I'm saying more study is needed. Pretty much everyone agrees on that. Your objections add nothing to t
Laughing Out Loud (Score:1)
Let's see. Every engineer, civil planner and economist said that it was ok to build massive coal fired plants, give everyone a car, and pave over a bunch of the planet with supe
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You don't think anyone even thought about how much water this would take? That's only like the most obvious question to ask. It's so idiotic that you bring something obvious like that up and expect to be lauded as insightful for it. You aren't bei
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Actually, now you are guilty of the crime of over simplification. I believe that it doesn't matter whether or not CO2 is causing the planet to warm or not warm, but that, we do have to manage the level. We already manage the water levels of lake
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Implementation of carbon credits will force the coal (and perhaps oil) industries to deal with their externalities. In the production of coal power the coal industry doesn't have to account for dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. I think all companies should deal with their externalities, but getting the carbon emitters to deal with CO2 would be a good start. The scam component is that whilst carbon credits manage CO2 they don't manag
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There's other ways to get that without a transfer tax to enrich the
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It might be about time we found a way for the first world to invest in the third world, the reality of our lifestyle is that we have plundered a significant amount of resources from those countries so whilst it may only be a stop-gap activity addressing deforestation (a carbon sponge - so to speak) maybe what we need to do to address secondary
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Although there are a fair number privately operated steam railways operating as
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Yes, Closed cycle reduces the water usage problems, however even so Stanleys (old closed cycle steam auto) did lose signif
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70 foot wide by 100 miles long * 100w