Slipping and sliding on snowy or icy roads is dangerous. Salt and sand help melt ice or provide traction, but excessive use is bad for the environment.
Slipping and sliding on snowy or icy roads is dangerous. Salt and sand help melt ice or provide traction, but excessive use is bad for the environment. And sometimes, a surprise storm can blow through before these materials can be applied. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Omega have filled microcapsules with a chloride-free salt mixture that’s added into asphalt before roads are paved, providing long-term snow melting capabilities in a real-world test.
Driving on snowy roads at or near-freezing temperatures can create unsafe conditions, forming nearly invisible, slick black ice, if roads aren’t cleaned quickly enough. But the most common ways to keep roads clear have significant downsides:
Regular plowing requires costly equipment, is labor intensive and can damage pavement.
Heavy salt or sand applications can harm the environment.
Heated pavement technologies are prohibitively expensive to use on long roadways.
Recently, researchers have incorporated salt-storage systems into “anti-icing asphalt” to remove snow and prevent black ice from forming. However, these asphalt pavements use corrosive chloride-based salts and only release snow-melting substances for a few years. So, Yarong Peng, Quansheng Zhao, Xiaomeng Chu and colleagues wanted to develop a longer-term, chloride-free additive to effectively melt and remove snow cover on winter roads.
Read more at American Chemical Society
Photo Credit: Turkkinen via Pixabay
