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Manohar Lal Baharani

Jun 24, 2014
04:43

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The idea is good. Consider applications modules as per requirements in the vicinity of the energy conversion as the road passes through urban / rural settlements and land where there are no takers of energy that gets converted. Returns on investment aspects. Good Luck and looking forward to the full proposal.

Patrick Mcnulty

Jun 25, 2014
08:15

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Thanks Manohar, Tweaking the proposal a bit now. Pat

Laur Hesse Fisher

Jul 24, 2014
01:02

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This proposal has been moved by an Administrator from the "Industry" contest to the "Energy supply" contest.

Climate Colab

Aug 13, 2014
04:20

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This is an interesting idea but unlikely to ever be cost effective. If you are putting collection system under pavement, you are only saving the cost of heat collection. The rest of the system is very expensive. If you are going to invest in all that capital, why not make the initial solar collection system more efficient as well this is a solar thermal system with inefficient collectors. It still has all the issues of non baselad power that may or may not be available in peak periods. The concept of using solar energy to power a turbine is well known and has been researched extensively. The concept is certainly feasible and successful prototypes have been built -- sometimes using mirrors to amplify and concentrate the solar energy onto copper tubes used to circulate the fluid.The reason such concepts have not found widespread commercial applications has been that the have generally not been cost effective when compared to alternative technologies. After taking into account the cost of building the generator and the length of the window in which it can produce power, the electricity produced is actually quite expensive.This proposal involves embedding tubing into the asphalt of roads to capture the solar energy absorbed by the road and using this to power a generator. While it is certainly true that asphalt gets hot, the proposed concept does nothing to lower the capital cost of building a thermal solar generator or to improve it's efficiency. A thermal solar collector assembled on a roof or on an empty field would be cheaper to build and could be designed to optimize the energy capture efficiency. Moreover it would be far cheaper to capture electricity from a rooftop unit than to ship power over many miles of highway or to store this for the use of an electric vehicle.The one advantage of using highways is that they do indeed present a large surface area with solar exposure. However, the road surface is exposed to a wide range of thermal and physical stresses. The asphalt will expand and contract as the surface temperature is subject to daily and seasonal extremes. At the same time, the road has to withstand traffic from heavy trucks. The coils embedded in the asphalt would have to be designed to withstand such stresses. Even it this were possible, the additional cost and shorter effective life would likely make the cost of such a system prohibitive.Lastly, asphalt is not the most durable of road building materials. The advantage of asphalt is that it is relatively cheap. Asphalt roads require maintenance and have to be regularly resurfaced. Any embedded coils would need to be discarded and rebuilt every time the road was resurfaced thereby setting an upper limit to their useful life.While the concept of generating electricity from thermal solar power using a Rankine cycle is certainly possible, I believe it would be difficult for this particular application to be cost effective.