A smart road equipped with solar energy technologies in America

ArabiaWeather- The modern company, Solar Roadways, intends to implement a project with an innovative idea that relies on paving Road No. 66 in Missouri with "smart paving", where panels of solar cells store the energy of sunlight during the day to provide lighting for road signs at night.

The company is cooperating with the Department of Transportation in the state of Missouri to implement the project, where it has actually begun the step of experimenting with the idea by replacing the asphalt in part of the road. While you will implement this idea in other ways if successful, according to The Next Web.

The idea of the project depends on covering the panels of solar cells with solid glass that can bear the weight of a locomotive for long-distance trips. The surface of this glass is characterized by its roughness, which makes its frictional force equivalent to that of asphalt.

The company indicated that these panels are manufactured in the form of hexagons with an area of 0.4 square meters. The capacity of each panel is 36 watts, which may decrease due to bad weather.

The road will be restored and repaired by replacing the defective plates with healthy plates, and the solar cells will allow the possibility of charging electric cars while they are driving directly on the road, in addition to that high-tech electronics will be installed inside the plates, including LED technology, which will provide illumination of road signs and lighting lines on both ends at night. And in conditions of limited visibility.

Heating elements will be installed in them to prevent the accumulation of ice on the road, and microprocessors will allow recording data such as the number of cars that drove on the road and their speeds, and sending this data to a unified control center.