Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).

While snow removal in urban areas involves considerable costs, the transport efficiency of a city can bex000D
strongly delayed by accidents and repairs. The methods currently employed for assuring winter mobility inx000D
regions with severe climate conditions consist mainly in the application of de-icing salts to roadways andx000D
sidewalks, and the clearing by mechanical snowplow. While the use of road salts for de-icing is an effectivex000D
method for ice removal, it causes damage to concrete and corrosion of reinforcing steel in strategicx000D
infrastructure systems, such as concrete bridge decks. Thus, snow removal is one of the major causes of thex000D
rapid deterioration of Canadian infrastructures. As alternative solution, Electrical Conductive Concrete hasx000D
been recently optimized at Université Laval for rapid heating slabs, with low installation and repair cost.x000D
This project focuses on the development of an efficient sensor-based control of an ECC pavement to clearx000D
snow and ice in the context of modern intelligent cities. By taking advantage of the recent ECC mix designx000D
developed at Université Laval (9), the objective of this project is twofold: (1) optimize the design of the ECCx000D
pavement with respect to the electrical system; (2) develop a sensor-control system for an efficient ECCx000D
pavement. The project is based on experimental campaign on small ECC slabs and large ECC slab in realx000D
environmental conditions for optimizing and verifying their energy efficiency as snow removal systems.