Hydronic Heating Pavement with Low Temperature: The Effect of Pre‐Heating and Fluid Temperature on Antiicing Performance

Paper in proceedings, 2018

A renewable method to mitigate the slippery condition on road surfaces is to use Hydronic Heating Pavement (HHP) system. The HHP system consists of embedded pipes in the road which a fluid as thermal energy carrier circulates through the pipes. The aim of this study it to evaluate the effects of pre-heating the road surface and different fluid temperatures on the anti-icing performance of the HHP system. A two- dimensional numerical simulation model was developed using finite element method in order to calculate the annual required energy and remaining hours of the slippery conditions on the road surface. The numerical simulation was validated by an analytical solution associated with an infinite region bounded internally by a pipe with a constant temperature. The validation result related to the heat flow and integrated heat loss from the pipe showed that for the running time longer than 20 minutes, the maximum relative error is less than 4% between the numerical simulation and the analytical solution. In order to evaluate the anti-icing performance of the HHP system, the climate data from Östersund, an area in middle of Sweden with cold and long winter period, were selected. Results showed that pre-heating the road considerably shortened the slippery hours of the road surface.