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."

Comments

More Patents

[icebike]

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.

Re:More Patents

[Fned]

A better candidate would be the fire department. Get them off the lazy boys, out of the station and doing some work.

Yeah, it's not like they have to be ready to put out fires or anything.

Re:More Patents

[JoeMerchant]

If they have something that's really worthwhile, it's a combo system that uses the NNF to fill the hole to a level surface, the a traditional asphalt cap over that. The beauty of the NNF is that it fills the gaps and voids quickly, but still provides strong resistance for shock from cars driving over.

I also assume that they've used something non-biodegradable, corn starch wouldn't make it very long exposed on a highway.

Of course I could RTFA, but what would happen to my Karma if I did that?

Re:More Patents

[rtb61]

This site puts it well http://www.davis-stirling.com/MainIndex/Asphalt/tabid/3350/Default.aspx. Potholes simply reflect cheap ass government focusing taxpayers dollars on kickbacks rather than on routine road maintenance. When you have pot holes, that represent either an unusual problem (flooding, water main burst etc.) or quite simply a break down in the proper duties of local government and or state government.

If you have pot holes in a major city and you ain't firing your elected representatives and replacing them with new representatives than you're bloody idiots and, yes according to Google street view US infrastructure roads and footpaths largely looks like shit.

What happens when a car stands still on them?

[CityZen]

Traffic isn't always flowing, after all. (And traffic itself acts like a non-Newtonian fluid, as well.)

Re:Stopping on it?

[Anubis IV]

The fluid is kept in a bag that is then covered by a black cloth to make it less visible to drivers. Even if they did sink into the pothole while at rest, they could still get out easily, and the bag would simply flow back into its original shape after a few seconds. The only hazard or concern I see there is if the next car drives over it before it flows back to being flat, in which case they may get a bit of a bump, but still no worse than the original pothole itself.

Re:This couldn't happen last week?

[MacGyver2210]

Use cheaper tires?