Heat Exchangers for Pavement Surface De-Icing

The goal of this paper is to investigate the potential use of pavement heat exchangers buried in the aggregate base layer to de-ice the pavement surface. Icy pavement forms a major roadway hazard with the annual fatalities due to loss of vehicle control on icy pavements exceeding those from natural disasters. Various efforts to use innovative techniques have been reported in the literature for deicing of bridge decks with very little dealing with de-icing of pavements. Heated pavement using geothermal energy is reported in the Netherlands. In their system, the pavement loops were buried in the asphalt layer which created several construction and operational concerns limiting the widespread of the technology. This study considers burying the loops in the base layer beneath the asphalt and it intends to investigate the feasibility of that technique. Finite element models were performed for New York City and it is shown that burying pavement loops in the base layer is a viable technique to de-ice pavements.