O/T solar Highways

Think it will work?
http://www.wimp.com/solarhighways/

WOW!What a concept!Oot of the box thnking.Yes,Ibelieve it will work.

Why not just give everyone a flying car? That way we won't need any roads and we can all plant trees to hug in their place.

Why don't we test the system on a Nascar track? I like seeing the pile ups. Roads need texture and bituminous pavements excel in that regard. Why do you think they stop racing when the track is wet. Who is going to pay for all the lawsuits when people start driving on glass?

Leave it to the government to fund that study. It's a waste and the grantees should be ashamed for accepting the grant. The next study will probably look into paving our roads with gold or building another two mile "Big Dig" such as the one in Boston at $15,000,000,000.

If the government wants to fund a study for solar capture sound barriers along the highways, that might make sense. A tilted barrier for optimal solar capture would probably have greater sound attenuation than the current vertical walls.

Or what about an embedded grid that would capture heat from the pavement and return it in a snow storm?

YEA!! I was supposed to have that by 1969! I'm still waiting!

(quoted from post at 12:16:06 03/13/11) Think it will work?
http://www.wimp.com/solarhighways/

Click to expand...

Maybe in the sun drenched and arid southwest. In the north with road salt and snowplows, probably not.
How about concrete roads?
Asphalt costs? Around here they just grind, heat and re-lay the old asphalt onto the same roadway.

I think it would be way to costly to do, I think
it would be efficent to use a geo thermal type of
roadway. Where I"m from there are a lot of borrow
pits along the interstate where they have removed
dirt to construct the interstate i think that we
could run coils through out the roads and use
existing ponds along the road ways and maybe then
use solar power to power the pumps needed to pump
the water through the coils, It would be costly
to do but long term i think it would pay for
itself as long as you keep the road a constant
temperature we wouldnt have to worry about the
freeze thaw cycle, hopefully eliminating the
potholes we deal with now. just a thought

That is a great idea now I'm heading for the draft table to try to figure out how to incorporate suction cups into tires for wet conditions .

I;m with you Red. I like to hear and see the so called out of the box thinlking in a project like this. Now if it can only be developed and privately funded.

Theoretically yes,practicly no. Artificial intelligence and gravity control is on my bucket list.

around here they grind roads too. they take the old material and add lots of asphalt to it to make new pavement.

The video was a confusing mish-mash about four different technologies that didn't seem to explain which was which or why you would use one or the other. Glass highways, photovoltaic highways, building LED signs into highways and recovering energy from vehicle motion.

I'm not an expert on glass, but it has a lot of desirable characteristics for a road surface. Glass has no crystalline structure, so it actually handles compression very well and maintains a fairly constant compressive strength over a wide temperature range. Unlike concrete, glass has tensile strength so rebar isn't required (rebar is the achille's heel of concrete in the rust belt). The question isn't so much whether you CAN make roads out of glass but whether they would be cheaper to build and maintain in the long run than asphalt or concrete.

Photovoltaic technology isn't any mystery. The cost is getting to where it is competitive with fossil fuel. But the best locations for photovoltaics (e.g. the southwest) aren't where the power is needed. Still, I wouldn't be surprised to photovoltaic roadways in a few years.

Once you get past the idea of glass roadways, it doesn't take a big leap to think of putting LED signs in them. Of course, they didn't show what those signs look like out in daylight!

The thing that is perhaps oddest but most practical is the recovery of power from wasted motion. There are actually a few places where this is being done with sidewalks: People walking over the sidewalk generate power. If you think about it, there are millions of places where roads and structures move as vehicles go over them: bridges and overpasses are examples. It's not that difficult to recover this energy which is otherwise lost. I don't know that you would want to do this with normal roadways, though: "springy" roadways would necessarily sap power from vehicles.