Asphalt Roads as Solar Collectors the Next Alternative Energy Revolution?

Blast into the Future: Alternative energy is revolutionizing the world. Solar collectors are everywhere and everything: they are home pathways, roof shingles, parking lots, roads, supermarket pavements, airport tarmacs…

Roads and parking lots as solar collectors? Is that the newest revolutionary innovation since the term “alternative energy”? Capturing solar energy from pavements has been perfected for years now.

Researchers at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute will unveil Tuesday, August 19, 2008 the findings of a research project on the concept of using the heat absorbed by pavements. Rajib Mallick, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, who was the team leader will hail the achievement as “revolutionary”.

By using the heat from asphalt, the researchers have developed a solar collector that could turn roads and parking lots into invisible and cheap sources of electricity and hot water.

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The research team will prove that asphalt has a lot of advantages as a solar collector. It is known that the blacktop stays hot and could continue to generate energy after the sun goes down, unlike traditional solar-electric cells. In addition, there is already a massive acreage of installed roads and parking lots that could be retrofitted for energy generation, so there will be no need to find additional land for solar farms.

Because roads and parking lots are typically resurfaced every 10 to 12 years, it will be ideal for retrofits to be built into that cycle, while cooling the asphalt surfaces by the heat extraction process without any visibility.

The team believes the key to successfully turning asphalt into an effective energy generator will include a specially designed, highly efficient heat exchanger that soaks up the maximum amount of the heat absorbed by asphalt to create a potentially important future source of renewable, pollution-free energy.

Mallick worked on the project with Bao-Liang Chen, a PhD candidate at WPI, and Sankha Bhowmick, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Massachusetts in Dartmouth.

They will present a paper, Capturing Solar Energy from Asphalt Pavements, showcasing the revolutionary energy capture methods before the International Society for Asphalt Pavements (ISAP) symposium on Asphalt Pavements and Environment between August 18th and 20th, 2008 in Zürich, Switzerland.

Image credit: Striatic at Flickr under a Creative Commons license

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