• Journal of the Korean Society for Geothermal and Hydrothermal Energy
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• v.19 no.3
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• pp.1-13
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• 2023

Hydronic heated road pavement (HHP) systems have been well established and documented to provide road safety in winter season over the past two decades. However, most of the systems run on asphalt, only a few are tested with concrete, and there rarely is a comparison between those two common road materials in their performance. The aim of this study is to investigate the thermal performance of the concrete HHP systems, including surface temperature variations of experimental pavements in winter season. For preliminary study a small-scale experimental system was installed to evaluate the heat transfer characteristics of the concrete HHP in the test field. The system consists of 3 concrete slabs made of 1 m in width, 1 m in length, and 0.25 m in height. In these slabs, circulating water piping was embedded with different pipe depths of 0.08 m (Case A), 0.12 m (Case B), and 0.20 m (Case C) and same horizontal space of 0.16 m. Heating performance in winter season was tested with different inlet temperatures of 25℃, 30℃, 35℃ and 40℃ during the entire measurement period. Overall, the surface temperature of the concrete HHPs remained above 3℃ in all experimental conditions applied in this study. The results of the surface temperature measurement with respect to the pipe depth showed that Case B was the highest among the three cases. However, the closer the circulating water pipe was to the pavement surface, the greater the heat exchange rate. This results is considered that the heat is continuously accumulated inside the pavements and then the temperature inside the pavements increases, while the amount of heat dissipation decreases as the temperature difference between the inlet and outlet of circulating water decreases. In this preliminary test the applicability of the concrete HHP on road deicing was confirmed. Finally, the results can be used as a basis for studying the effects of various variables on road pavements through numerical analysis and for conducting large-scale empirical experiments.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Geothermal and Hydrothermal Energy
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.8-19
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• 2023

Hydronic heated road pavement (HHP) systems have well studied and documented by many researchers. However, most of the systems run on asphalt, only a few are tested with concrete, and there rarely is a comparison between those two common road materials in their heating and cooling performance. The aim of this study is to investigate the thermal performance of the HHP, such as heat dissipation performance in winter season while focusing on the surface temperature of the concrete and asphalt pavement. For preliminary study a small-scale experimental system was designed and installed to evaluate the heat transfer characteristics of the HHP in the test field. The system consists of concrete and asphalt slabs made of 1 m in width, 1 m in length, and 0.25 m in height. In two slabs, circulating water piping was embedded at a depth of 0.12 m at intervals of 0.16 m. Heating performance in winter season was tested with different inlet temperatures of 25℃, 30℃, 35℃ and 40℃ during the entire measurement period. The results indicated that concrete's heating performance is better than that of asphalt, showing higher surface temperatures for the whole experiment cases. However, the surface temperature of both concrete and asphalt pavement slabs remained above 0℃ for all experimental conditions. The heat dissipation performance of concrete and asphalt pavements was analyzed, and the heat dissipation of concrete pavement was greater than that of asphalt. In addition, the higher the set temperature of the circulating water, the higher the heat dissipation. On the other hand, the concrete pavement clearly showed a decrease in heat dissipation as the circulating water set temperature decreased, but the decrease was relatively small for the asphalt pavement. Based on this experiment, it is considered that a circulating water temperature of 20℃ or less is sufficient to prevent road ice. However, this needs to be verified by further experiments or computational fluid dynamic (CFD) analysis.