Thanks to groundbreaking research being undertaken by civil engineering master's student Andrew Northmore we could one day be driving on glass instead of asphalt or concrete. With solar panels embedded below the glass much-needed electricity would be generated.
“If you were to put down solar road panels across every interstate highway in the United States, you’d be able to generate three times the electricity that they use in a day,” says Northmore whose paper on his research was named among top student papers at a recent engineering conference. He will also write his master's thesis on his research.
In the next few months Northmore plans to build and test three prototypes, each about one square metre. One will measure electricity from a solar panel embedded between glass surface and fibreglass base. Glass will be laminated, tempered and textured, to boost strength, contain fragments if it breaks and prevent slipping.
A second prototype will be put through 100 freeze-thaw cycles in a laboratory freezer, to simulate three winters. A third prototype will be squashed to see what it takes to break it.