Development of an innovative sensor-controlled deicing system built with an optimized electrical cementitious composites ECC

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