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Making Quieter Highways
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Purdue are investigating ways to make life for those who live near major highways more quiet. They have found that most of the noise is literally where the rubber hits the road, not engine noise or even passing winds. The team has come up with a new form of pavement that is in testing in Arizona and will soon be installed in California. The pavement is simply asphalt with some mixed in rubber."
A similar compound was invented in the Netherlands ages ago, using concrete (cheaper and easier to handle then rubber). It is called ZOAB ("Zeer Open Asfalt Beton", meaning "Very Open Asphalt Concrete") This highly porous material has several beneficial properties, such as being more quiet, and more efficient in draining water, thus preventing aquaplaning. It is a safer road, alltogether. Now some university is passing this off as a "Great American Invention"?!?!
Same thing happend with airport groundradar. A Norwegian Company invented a groundradar system for airports, allowing safer manouvering of aircraft in dense fog and other low viz situations. This delivered tremendous safety to airports. The FAA wanted it, but it had to be american - can't buy of those eurotrash companies and all that. 8 years down the line, and it still was not working. In the meantime, you have had about 33 near misses at o'hare alone.......
Obviously I shall now be modded down -50 "unpatriotic eurotrash bastard" whatever.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
That IS pretty DAMN high! The coefficient of friction of rubber on dry asphalt is around 0.6 or 0.7, which is already considered to be pretty high. So logically, adding rubber to asphalt would probably improve the coefficient of friction between the tires and the road, hence decreasing stopping distance and improving cornering.
Physics is the study of everything.
-73, de n1ywb
www.n1ywb.com
I guess it's different in the states, and possibly elsewhere, but in canada (or at least the handful of cities I've lived in), they've been using rubber in pavement on busy streets for years.