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Sandie Allen
Friday, August 7, 2009
WPI, UMass Dartmouth researchers explore pavement as alternative energy source
By Jackie Noblett
MHT's Jackie Noblett: Generating power from hot pavement
Following the Clean Energy Council Fellows
MHT reporter Efrain Viscarolasaga on NECN: Green tech brings jobs back to Mass.
It may be hot enough to fry an egg, but one local company is trying to prove you can do something even more useful with sizzling pavement — generate energy.
Novotech Inc., an Acton-based optical and semiconductor materials company, has teamed up with Rajib Mallick, an associate professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Sankha Bhowmick, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, to develop technology similar to radiant floorboard heating that would draw heat captured in asphalt and other roadway materials and generate hot water or even steam that could be used to generate power.
If it works, it could effectively turn lightly used parking lots into massive water heaters.
“A tremendous amount of heat is coming in from asphalt,” said Michael Hulen, founder and owner of Novotech. “It would probably be described as waste heat, but we kind of think of pavement as a new energy source.”
The company has been selected from thousands of applicants to the U.S. Department of Energy’s stimulus-funded Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA-E, program to provide a detailed proposal of its technology. If the proposal wins funding, the group plans to launch a large-scale test of its technology at a parking lot at Arizona State University in Tempe, Ariz.
Scorching pavement is more than a problem for bare feet: Heat stored in asphalt and concrete warms the surrounding air, creating what is known as an “urban heat island” around cities. Such heat islands then require more power to cool buildings, spiking energy use. High temps also cause pavement to buckle and create ruts in the surface.
“I think this has a huge potential of application in areas with high pavement temperatures,” Mallick said. “By extracting heat, we are lowering the pavement temperature and hence extending its life. It’s a win-win situation.”
There are technical challenges in drawing energy from asphalt, however. The material is an insulator, which retains energy, rather than a conductor, which transfers energy.
Hulen and Mallick have experimented with ways of transferring the heat to copper pipes, from simply laying pipes about an inch below the pavement wrapped in a highly conductive mesh such as graphite, to complex webs of heat sinks that mimic residential floorboard heating systems.
Hulen began looking into the energy properties a decade ago because Novotech develops optical infrared sensors for night-vision systems. Yet after receiving a patent, and competing in several business plan competitions — including the MIT 100K and Ignite Clean Energy competition — he could not generate interest from the investment community because there had been minimal testing of the technology.
About three years ago, Hulen approached the WPI pavement laboratory and Mallick about proving the concept and building a business plan with funding from the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative. “In the course of my research, I had the opportunity to collect samples from a wide variety of pavements,” Mallick said. “Since the behavior of asphalt changes dramatically with a change in temperature, I became curious about the effect of temperature on pavement layers.”
Mallick then brought on Bhowmick, an expert in heat transfer and thermodynamics at UMass Dartmouth, to help with the modeling of systems as well as experiments of the technology.
While the technology could be used on any roadway, the group is initially targeting parking lots for several reasons: There are fewer issues with siting and jurisdiction, and the energy can be used more readily in buildings.
That energy could be in the form of electricity, although not from steam turbines, Hulen said. It is possible to generate power from a specialized turbine, but more likely the heat would be transferred directly for hot-water systems or used in specialized chillers on buildings adjacent to the parking lots.
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