Project Summary
This project will deliver a proof-of-concept for an innovative ‘thermal battery’ road system designed to enhance the resilience of UK transport infrastructure. By capturing wasted solar heat from road surfaces in summer and redeploying it for anti-icing in winter, the system improves year-round safety and extends pavement life. This sustainable, retrofit-capable technology offers a new pathway to decarbonise road maintenance and create a more reliable transport network.
Project Achievements
Our project introduces a thermo-active road system designed to turn our pavement from a passive slab of tarmac into a climate-responsive asset. By embedding a network of water-filled pipes within the asphalt, we can capture the intense solar heat that builds up during the summer and store it underground. When winter arrives, this stored heat is brought back up to keep the road surface just above freezing. We successfully constructed a high-fidelity, 1500-litre laboratory investigation chamber to simulate real-world environmental conditions and road structures. Through extensive physical testing, we quantified how different fluid flow rates and temperatures affect both heat harvesting and pavement cooling performance. These experimental results were used to validate a sophisticated 3D computer model, which achieved exceptional accuracy in predicting the system’s thermal behaviour. Finally, we developed an efficiency framework to isolate the critical factors, such as soil type and pipe design, that determine how effectively heat can be stored and reused seasonally.
Conclusions
This technology creates a circular energy system that significantly reduces the environmental footprint of road maintenance. By eliminating the need for corrosive de-icing salts, we protect local habitats and vehicles while extending the natural lifespan of the road surface. The system ensures critical routes remain safe and open during severe weather, empowering vulnerable road users, including disabled drivers and those in rural areas, to travel with confidence year-round. Ultimately, this project offers a scalable pathway to a more resilient, low-carbon transport network that supports the UK’s net-zero and safety goals.
Next Steps
Following our successful proof-of-concept, we are focused on disseminating our results through open-access publications to share these insights with the wider transport industry. Our immediate goal is to secure follow-on funding to develop a larger-scale, outdoor prototype that can be tested under real-world weather conditions. We are working closely with our partners at National Highways and Surrey Highways to plan future full-scale field trials. These steps will lead towards a commercial licensing model, enabling civil engineering contractors to adopt this climate-adaptive technology across the UK’s mature road network.
