Numerical Investigation of Anti-Icing Road Surfaces using Hydronic Heating Pavement- Parametric Study

Paper in proceeding, 2019

An environmental friendly method to mitigate the slippery condition on road surfaces is to use a Hydronic Heating Pavement (HHP). The performance of the HHP system strongly depends on its design parameters. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of different design parameters of the HHP system on the anti-icing operation of the road surface. A hybrid 3D numerical simulation model of HHP system is used to simulate the anti-icing operation. The numerical model is validated by an analytical solution. The validation result shows that the maximum relative error associated with the temperature decline along the pipe is less than 3% between the obtained results from the numerical simulation model and the analytical solution. The results show that the distance between pipes has the most significant effect on improving the anti-icing operation, so changing the distance from 400 mm to 50 mm resulted in a 90% decrease in the remaining number of hours of the slippery conditions on the road surface. The order of parameters, investigated in this study, associated with shortening the number of hours of the slippery condition on the road surface is: (i) the distance between the pipes, (ii) the fluid flow rate, (iii) the inlet temperature of fluid, (iv) the embedded depth of the pipe and (v) the pipe diameter.