The self-healing road | Hacker News Reader

The self-healing road

humansinvent.com

36 pointsleojkent18 comments

That's pretty cool, but "self healing" is a bit misleading.

It's not very self healing when it requires somebody to drive along with a vehicle that would heat up the road to fix it. That's like saying all current roads are self-healing because they just require someone to drive along and fill in the holes.

Still cool though, easier to repair roads are always good.

Maybe they should call it a "more durable road".

It's not more durable, it's easier to patch up. Simply said, this technique allows maintenance workers to heat the bitumen up uniformly, allowing it to flow and fix its own small cracks and brittleness, and avoiding larger damages over time.

Bumping that durability up from 8 to 16 years even with some maintenance is probably a net win, but it seems a long way from the 40+ years you can get from concrete.

Given that roads are built as a permanent structure which isn't permanent, thus terribly hard to replace...

I've wondered about building roads featuring self-leveling snap-in sections. Dispersed energy from traffic could be captured to operate its active self-leveling and status-reporting functions. When a section breaks - which like any road it will - a crew is notified, brings out a new section, pops out the old, installs the new within a few minutes, and moves on. No more long-term breakdowns, huge effort ripping out old road, long period rebuilding a replacement - all due to building asphalt/concrete roads as permanent structures which aren't.

Yes, up front costs are higher, but we've been building roads long enough to know there are substantial long term maintenance and replacement costs.

I don't know a lot about road building, but I always thought that is the point of jointed concrete roads.

Sure, and I've seen sidewalks made the same way, but you can't use concrete in the "salt belt" [0] because salt causes ridiculous amounts of pitting in concrete roads.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Belt

Hm, what do states that get snow, but don't use salt do? Like CO for instance?

Also, I'm from PA, and pa/nj/ny are probably where i've seen the most concrete roads? (maybe that's why PA roads are so shitty compared to MD/VA?, besides the fact that they re-pave their roads every 2 years....)

Hm, http://www.pothole.info/2011/03/how-road-salt-leads-to-rough... and other sources I just Googled seem to agree that salt only affects concrete in certain situations. I guess there's some other reason we don't have concrete roads up in New Hampshire...

Too bad this would be useless here in Brazil, in fact MORE useless...

Here I've seen many times asphalt with objects embedded on it (usually bottle caps), because many places in Brazil get hot enough to asphalt partially melt, this technology here would be REALLY self-healing.

The problem is, asphalt that is very cheap to fix, and more durable, or cheaper in long term, is not interesting, because it means less money to steal, in Brazil everyone knows that the purpose of roads is steal public money, not to use, this is why every road or is full of holes, or full of patches.

Typical brazillian road: http://postagemteste.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/03.jpg

Very smart. The cost of maintaining roads in cold countries is crazy. This technique should bring substantial savings. Or an incentive to have better roads as it's cheaper to maintain.

Interesting, but I was more impressed by the Solar Roadway idea, personally.. ( http://www.solarroadways.com/ )

Wow that is a really interesting concept. I particularly like the way it could be deployed incrementally. I'd still have concerns over the durability of the road (especially electronoic components). Theft might be an issue too.

How long does the induction truck (I'm calling it a road zamboni) take to heal the surface?

Is summer enough to auto heal?

It's been invented before. But it will never take b/c road construction companies do not want anything eating into their reoccurring revenue stream. Why do you think our roads are getting worse and worse?

The big problem with any additives is that asphalt is usually ripped up and recycled. These processes usually make it harder or impossible to recycle.

How hot does the road have to get before the self-healing process kicks in? Would warmer climates even need the induction machine?

Could they use a cheaper material than steel?

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