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Using Non-Newtonian Fluids To Fill Potholes
sciencehabit writes in with a link about a group of students who have come up with an interesting idea about how to fill potholes. "Non-Newtonian fluids are the stars of high school science demonstrations. In one example, an ooey-gooey batter made from corn starch and water oozes like a liquid when moved slowly. But punch it, or run across a giant puddle of it, and it becomes stiff like a solid. Now, a group of college students has figured out a new use for the strange stuff: filler for potholes."
The students plan to patent their invention, so they won't divulge their exact formulation,
Exact formulation isn't necessary for this application, as every 7th grade science class learns it by trial and error with a $1.29 box of corn starch.
You can do this in your kitchen in 10 minutes, and the stuff is fun to play with but nobody has found a real good application for it in over a
hundred years.
The trick in keeping the right proportions of water and starch, something that rain and sun will contrive to disrupt. Burst their bag and you have a big mess.
If you stop with a tire one of these, such as at a traffic light, you will sink into it, because given constant pressure, it will flow. It only resists changing pressure, or active kneading, not static weights.
But the beauty here is the rapidity with which these can be thrown down, and they fact that they flow into the pothole, conform to its shape, and thereby resist being ejected by cars.
P.S. It will be a cold day in hell before you find Police patching potholes.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Neat idea and looks to be working well for cars moving fast.
What about traffic jams though where cars come to a stop on these bags. I'd imagine they'd sing in somewhat and might have trouble moving out of the hole from there.
I cannot foresee a way to prevent people from stealing these. I mean, I know it sounds silly, but renters steal light fixtures, for crying out loud.
I have the hiccups.
Traffic isn't always flowing, after all. (And traffic itself acts like a non-Newtonian fluid, as well.)
They should just make roads out of it.
It's a great idea ... until you read that "The bag might cost a hundred dollars but you can reuse it a hundred times, and by that time you'd be saving a ton of money". So yes, great idea ... until kids start stealing them BECAUSE THEY CAN.
Also : Read the AC posts in any slashdot story and you'll be quick to agree : the world is filled with angry kids.
Quartz Extreme and Core Image. Are there any other real reasons to spend all that money on generic hardware?
If it's cheap, and will get towns to fix shit fast, then I'm all for it.
Blew $300 on a new tire last week. Had to swerve so I wouldn't hit a deer, and went straight over a pothole.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I think the auxetics people are ahead on the whole thing.
Every end has half a stick.
Given the tendency bacteria cultures have of finding their way into this stuff, you may start out with a patched pothole but end up with a slightly squishy speed bump after a short while.
The problem with this is that it won't last. You see they put a cover over it. Why is that? Because goop would get stuck to the tires and that would erode the "fluid" away. So they have to put a cover over it. And the cover might move, or fluid might evaporate or god knows what else.
Consider the current solutions of putting sand in the pothole which works for a little while until the sand is eroded away. You could put a little mat over the sand just like they did in for the fluid to get the same result at a cheaper price. And of course, the real solution is to just fill the god damn pot hole in with some asphalt. THIS is why pot holes are so annoying. It's not because they're hard to fix. It's because they're stupid easy to fix and they're not because the transit authority is lazy.
We could say they're underpaid or underfunded or it's hard to keep track of where the problems are but there are some problems with that little theory.
1. the transit budgets are more then sufficient to handle the pot holes if they stopped looting the transit funds to build over priced mass transit systems and instead put the money to what it was for in the first place... roads, bridges, etc. If you have something left over after that... after all the pot holes are filled... then you can put what's left into little pet projects. But not a penny from the fund for anything but road maintenance until the roads have been actually maintained.
2. The notion that they can't keep track of all the pot holes would be understandable if it took them a few days to catch a pot hole. However, they often don't address a pot hole for months. That's not a question of not being able to track it. They know it's there. It's in the middle of on of the busiest streets in a city of millions of people. Probably a hundred thousand people in a week see that pot hole at a minimum. So they know it's there.
3. There aren't even that many of them. In a given square mile how many pot holes form in a given week? It only gets out of control when they're left to build up and whole street turns into potholes.
it's crap like that is that makes Americans want SUVs. The urban street is increasing turning into an off road experience between the god damn speed bumps and the god damn potholes. Try this guys... flat. Just try it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
As a former Clevelander (and in fact, and alum of CWRU) I could see this being about the greatest thing since sliced bread. Every year the major roads form pot holes over the winter, and they sit there open until somebody gets a chance to fill them with asphalt. Seriously, Chester is a mess until sometime in June every year.
If they could put these down for a couple of weeks while the weather is too crappy to patch, it would save a lot of people a lot of wear and tear on their cars.
IANAIPL (I am not an IP Lawyer), but I thought mixtures of liquids generally can't be patented.
Metal alloys can be patented because that's seen as somehow changing the "fundamental quality" of the metals, whilst something like fracking fluid is just a "mixture of liquids" and can only be covered as a Trade Secret. Someone confirm/deny?
Instead of allowing people on highways to drive faster w/o damaging their cars, why not deploy them to cause damage to cars that are driving too fast.
Maybe this stuff can be used as a movable speed bumps in school zones and children play zones? If you drive slow enough, no problem. If you run over them too fast, you destroy your car's suspension. People are pointing out that it can be stolen, perhaps this mobility is just what you need for this problem. In the middle of the day (or the weekend), you can just move them away. That seems like this would be much more effective than the radar speed-signs that exist there now and less of a liability and expense for hiring lots of crossing guards. You might also sell this to HOAs that can't convince local fire departments to allow them to put in speed bumps or neighborhood groups that have lots of children playing in their front yards.
Dibs on the patent for this use case. ;^)
I think suing should be a last resort, but our roads just seem to be falling apart. It's like an obstacle course now. Can you sue the city for negligence for not maintaining these roads? There are real and expensive damages to our cars every day.
And why do we see so many potholes in the city, but not on the highway? Is it because they dig up the city roads every other day? Is there a better street architecture solution that would allow cable maintenance without digging up the roads?
How is this a better idea than filling a pothole with just loose gravel? It's cheaper, it can be easily emplaced, it can be easily reused (if you really want), and it resists deforming even better if I had to guess. They don't seem to have built a better mousetrap; just a more expensive one.
Where does it say that the local government has to fix roads? Or even MAKE roads?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Plus what the heck are we going to do with all of the asphalt?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I'm getting fed up of the constant references to the magical properties on "non-Newtonian" fluids. Non-Newtonian fluids have a huge range of properties in terms of their response to shear and change over time. This is constantly abused by geeks who should know better. Off the top of my head:
What people usually mean is a "shear-thickening" fluid such as corn starch and water. These become more effectively viscous in response to shear.
"Shear-thinning" fluids are *also* non-Newtonian, are fairly common, and have the exact opposite behaviour. Ketchup is a great example - shaking the bottle helps it flow more easily.
Another interesting case are Bingham plastics - these have a yield stress before they will flow. The classic example is toothpaste - it will stay as a lump on the bristles under its own weight, but spreads easily enough under pressure.
So the next time somebody wants to demonstrate non-Newtonian properties on their speaker cone, pass the ketchup!
Is it me or in the video the bag explodes at 0:42?
Obviously the more expensive option.
Actually you can most places depending on the circumstances. If the pothole was reported and the city hadnt done anything about it in X number of days they can be held liable depending on local regulations.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
What happens if you happen to be on top of a patch when you hit the brakes? Will it tear the bag open and send you skidding?
If it's spring and the temperatures are +10 during the day and -5 at night it can be tricky to fill the pothole properly, especially if there's still runoff from melting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CJJ6FrfuGU
Slightly OT, but another fun use for these fluids is to fill a shallow container with one and place it above an upward-facing speaker. Hook up a tone generator and you can watch the fluid form increasingly intricate patterns as the frequency of the tone is increased.
Stoners, take note!
Your brain is not a computer.
It's the bag! You could put most anything in it and it'd work. Although you couldn't patent putting gravel in a bag.... or could you?
I wonder how it would hold up to a skinny-tired bike? Or if someone stepped on it?
That idea was proposed many years ago in the Feedback column of New Scientist. They went one better and proposed using a non-newtonian fluid for roadside areas where parking is prohibited; you could driver over it but if you parked then your car would sink into the goo ;-)
The moment that the unions for the workers who currently repair the pot holes find out about this, they will hit the roof. Also, most likely, the Police Unions will also object as it has the police officer doing work (fixing pot holes) which is not law enforcement related. Which would be an abuse of their members. Unless they were paid more, of course. That would set up a war between the unions in addition to the "Pot Holes Repairers" Union and the city/county/state.
the pot hole problem has nothing to do with improper filler, it has everything to do with lack of funding. When all of these pro corporate, anti government propaganda fodder finally get their way, I guess we can count on GE and AT&T to fix the roads or maybe some amazing new technology (the kind of new technology that's actually been in science projects since time immemorial), right? And an amazing new technology (Christianity, I'm assuming?) to educate the stupid kids and care for people's ailing parents. Guess what? It's not gonna happen. Jesus and new technology isn't going to fix your roads, deal with your elderly parents that pharma has barely alive in some zombie like state, educate your STUPID, fat kids and it's not going to pay for your retirement you couldn't afford to save for while you work two jobs. Get it?