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Turning roads into solar collectors

By Shawn Schuster

The possibilities of creating solar energy from asphalt seem a bit far-fetched, but researchers at Massachusetts' Worcester Polytechnic Institute are looking into a way to do just that. By discovering the hottest layer of asphalt (it turns out, it's two inches below the surface), these researchers are trying to find ways to make it even hotter by painting an anti-reflective coating and adding in some highly thermal-conductive quartzite.

How would this help conduct sustainable electricity? Well that's the key to this whole thing. They're trying everything from laying a series of flexible and highly conductive copper tubing, to utilizing an un-named "highly efficient heat exchanger" in hopes of picking up the intense heat for use in power generation. Of course there are still so many unanswered questions with all of this, but if these WPI researchers can pull this off successfully, it may be a cheap way to gather solar energy for the masses.

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