Summer 2007
In this Issue:
Focus On Metamaterials
Highways of Glass - One Man Dreams of Changing the World
At the 1st International Workshop on Scientific Challenges of New Functionalities in Glass, the list of attendees represented a Who's Who of international glass scientists and glass manufacturers. They were in Washington in early April, with support from the National Science Foundation, to challenge each other to find innovative and ground breaking uses for glass, one of the most versatile and important materials of modern technology. As the organization's director, Lehigh University professor Himanshu Jain pointed out, no other class of materials has contributed to so many modern day technologies or made as great an impact on the quality of life in the 20th century as glass. (Visit the IMI-NFG website at www.lehigh.edu/imi).
Mr. Brusaw Goes to Washington
"For roughly the cost of the current systems (asphalt roads and fossil fuel burning electricity generation plants), the Solar Roadways can be implemented. No more Global Warming. No more power outages (roaming or otherwise). Safer driving conditions. Far less pollution. What are we waiting for?" - Scott Brusaw
Brusaw was at the conference at the invitation of Carlo Pantano, who was co-director of the Institute. A few months earlier Brusaw had contacted the Materials Research Institute, via e-mail, asking for information. Pantano suggested he attend the glass workshop in Washington. Brusaw could present a poster on his work and network with high-level industry people who might be interested in his project.
The workshop organizers had been fortunate enough to snag the National Science Foundation director Arden Bement as a pre-lunch speaker. In his talk, Bement championed transformative research, the kind that crosses many disciplines and can disrupt and transform a technology. This kind of high-risk, long-term research, requiring massive amounts of resources, is what the NSF exists to encourage, Bement told the audience. Brusaw's ears pricked up. At lunch, he jogged the director's elbow and gave him the 2-minute elevator pitch. The NSF director was friendly, but noncommittal.
Energy Producing Roads Made of Glass and Solar Cells
Brusaw's company, Solar Roadways, is based out of his house in Idaho and in the home electronics workshop he built next to it with the income from his consulting. Solar Roadways is still in the concept phase, built on a childhood fascination with an electric race car game called slot cars. The idea of cars running on electric roads stayed with him as he went on to earn his Master's degree in electrical engineering. As global warming became established science, his wife Julie suggested he turn his obsession with electric roads into a way to conserve fuel and reduce pollution. Brusaw came up with the idea of a road that produced its own electricity, a solar highway for energy independence.
One of the nation's leading authorities on solar energy, Nate Lewis of Caltech, has calculated that covering 1.7% of the land surface of the United States with 10 percent efficient solar energy converters could supply all our current national energy demand. As it happens, this is roughly the same amount of land that is devoted to the nation's interstate highway system. Lewis believes that covering a large, barren section of some of the western states with solar panels is the best solution to our energy needs, but we would need a photovoltaic material almost as cheap as paint to make it cost competitive with fossil fuels, and we would still need to transport the energy around the country.
In Brusaw's Solar Roadways concept, instead of covering a large area of the Southwest with solar arrays, all of our roads would be paved with glass panels that could collect and distribute solar energy. Sunlight would shine through the surface onto a middle layer of solar cells. The solar cells would produce electric energy to light the road at night and heat it in winter, with enough leftover electricity to power homes and businesses. Brusaw estimates that each mile of solar panels could power 500 homes.
Brusaw's Rationale for Solar Roadways:
- 4.84 billion (12' by 12') Solar Road Panels would be required to replace the current asphalt road system, parking lots, and driveways in the 48 contiguous states. This is enough to provide three times more electricity than the United States used in 2003 and almost enough to supply the entire world.
- To produce a Solar Roadway Panel (not including assembly and installation) would cost approximately $5,000 for materials. Solar cell cost and efficiency is predicted to improve dramatically with thin film technologies in the next few years.
- Cost to build enough coal-fired power plants to provide a similar amount of electricity - approx. $14 trillion.
- The cost of Global Warming is unknown, but could reach 5% to 20% of global gross domestic product annually, according to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change.
To answer the energy transport needs, the roadway's base layer would contain the nation's electric grid, safe from weather and secure from interruption, replacing the current crumbling power grid with a distributed network of independent power sources providing energy from coast to coast. Along with electricity, the base layer could also carry fiber optic cables for television, communication, and high speed Internet so that cities and rural areas would be equally connected and the ugly poles and wires that clutter our landscape could be removed. Smart roadways could reconfigure travel lanes to reduce gridlock, warn drivers of construction or obstacles ahead, sense whiteouts or other weather conditions, and even keep wildlife off the roads. In Brusaw's scheme, heated and lighted roadways would make traveling safer and save lives (see sidebar).
Most of the technologies required for the base and middle layers are already available, Brusaw told the glass scientists and industry reps at the Washington workshop. With only a minute of his allotted time remaining, he summarized his challenges to the scientists and manufacturers: Build a transparent glass panel that absorbs sunlight without any glare, lit by low energy LEDs from within, with heating elements to melt ice and snow and a surface both fireproof and shatterproof with traction equal to asphalt, even when wet, with the ability to withstand road salt, magnesium chloride, sun exposure, vehicle emissions such as antifreeze and oil, and the strength and flexibility to handle heavy trucks. And finally, in order to make the project economically feasible, the glass should last about three times as long as most asphalt roads, he concluded.
In the silence that followed his brief talk, it was hard to tell what the scientists were thinking. Were they absorbing the issues Brusaw had raised, or was it too far out of their comfort zone? Over the course of the two-day workshop a number of innovative uses for glass were proposed - from glass memory to nanostructures in glass, functionalized glass coatings, and glass for microelectrical components. But for sheer audacity, none of them held a candle to Brusaw's Solar Roadways.
For Carlo Pantano, it was reminiscent of something similar that occurred in his undergraduate days back in the seventies. A visiting lecturer from Texas Instruments had dropped in to describe a new technology that he was working on to try to embed electronic circuits in a silicon substrate. The speaker didn't know how much it would cost or how it would ever be used, but he thought there might someday be a market for these "integrated circuits." When the visiting scientist left, Pantano's instructor assured the class that the idea would soon be forgotten. The computer and electronics revolution proved his instructor wrong, and so it might be for roads made of solar panels. Pantano invited Brusaw to visit Penn State after the conference to give a talk to materials science and engineering students and meet with faculty who might be interested in his ideas.
Mr. Brusaw Visits Penn State
University Park is four hours north of Washington D.C., via circuitous highways that on this April evening were washed by heavy rains and high winds, making driving difficult. A lighted roadway with smart signage would have been a blessing on a night like this. By 11:00 on Wednesday morning, Mr. Brusaw was standing in the front of a lecture hall in Steidle Building, which is home to Penn State's highly regarded Materials Science and Engineering Department comprised of 150 undergraduates and more than 200 graduate students. Ten minutes before his lecture was to begin, even with free coffee and cookies available, the hall was still empty.
By 11:10 students were beginning to trickle in. Five minutes later, when Pantano stood up to introduce Brusaw, there was not an empty seat in the small auditorium, and students were crowded against the back wall. Pantano told the students that Solar Roadways was a unique and challenging idea that addressed an important topic: energy. It was just the type of concept that a new generation of engineers and scientists might roll up their sleeves and make happen over the next 15 or 20 years, he said.
Brusaw's talk was a 20-minute version of the poster talk he had presented in Washington. This time the reaction was far livelier. A hubbub of questions and suggestions greeted him. The students, at least, seemed on his side. Some of the faculty were skeptical.
Where Do You Go From Here?
Some Facts & Figures
- Road maintenance costs $15.8 billion annually.
- Thirty-five percent of America's major roads are in poor or mediocre condition.
- Driving on roads in need of repair costs U.S. motorists $54 billion a year in extra vehicle repairs and operating costs.
- A total of 212,235 people died on U.S. highways from 2000 through 2004. Roadway conditions are a significant factor in approximately onethird of traffic fatalities.
- Motor vehicle crashes cost U.S. citizens $239 billion per year in medical costs, lost productivity, travel delay, workplace costs, insurance costs, and legal costs.
- The number of older drivers is increasing at a faster rate than the total population and will increase at an accelerated rate as baby boomers reach 65. Recommendations for reducing traffic fatalities among older drivers include clearer and larger signage, bright and luminous lane markings, and better illumination, especially at intersections.
Source:
TRIP: The Road Information Program
Following his talk to the students, it was still unclear what Brusaw had gained from his trip east to Washington and Penn State. Bement, the NSF director, didn't carry grant money around in his pocket, none of the scientists had accepted his challenge, and the students, though enthusiastic, were busy picking through the remaining cookies and scarfing the free coffee in the lecture hall.
Fortunately, Pantano had arranged a lunch meeting for which he had invited a cross section of faculty to meet Brusaw, including an architect, a futurist, a rural road specialist, and an expert on sustainability. Over lunch, Pantano discussed new technologies that might enable Brusaw's dream: new types of self-cleaning windows with microstructures based on the lotus flower's ability to shed water, and recent breakthroughs in superconducting transmission cables cooled by liquid nitrogen that carried five times the current of standard cables. The road specialist suggested building a mile of test road, perhaps in a federal forest where conditions could be controlled, to test the plan's feasibility. The architect said that people were beginning to realize there would be no cheap or easy solutions to global climate change, so the public might be ready for some visionary solution. The sustainability expert calculated the cost of solar cells - still high, but constantly improving and coming down in price. The futurist offered several ideas for funding a prototype. Everyone at the table knew that success depended less on the science or engineering than on politics and funding.
"Your head must be spinning," the architect said to Brusaw after their plates were cleared. "We'll go back to our busy work days. But you have to go home and carry on. Where do you go from here?"
"Where should I go?" Brusaw asked.
Brusaw went back to Idaho encouraged by his meetings. In Washington, a vice president for Corning Glass had approached him, perhaps intrigued by Brusaw's mention of the need for 4.5 billion panels of glass. If nothing else, Brusaw had spread the concept of Solar Roadways among a few high circles in science, industry, and government.
The sun was shining brightly in Idaho, even as it was starting to set on the East Coast. That was part of his plan, that solar roads might one day carry the sun's energy from west to east, lighting up the dark streets and monuments of Washington, DC with energy from the west. It was the kind of idea only an outsider could come up with, the kind Mr. Smith would have loved.
For Solar Roadways questions, contact Scott Brusaw at (208) 255-1254 or scott@solarroadways.com.
For questions relating to the IMI-NFG workshop contact MRI Director Carlo Pantano ( Validate to view address - Send Email via form ) or Himanshu Jain ( Validate to view address - Send Email via form ).
The MRI website is www.mri.psu.edu.
