Slashdot Mirror
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.)
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
Actually, that'd do wonders to keep traffic flowing. And fast. Because who'd want to stop?
1. Mass TRANSIT is part of the transit budget.
2. There are more then one pothole. There a lot, and the queue is often very long. Plus, if work is going to be done for some other reason, they put off the pot hole repair. And some street required special permissions to close, as well as cost a lot of money in diversions.
3. Depends on your environment, and weather or not the budget allows for quality material and labor.
You need to close off portion of the street, have it located*, check for other work.
That means back ups, delays, store owners angry.
*marked to determine whats under the road at that spot.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
it's crap like that is that makes Americans want SUVs
And the more bigger, heavier SUV's, the quicker the roads wear out... same with them hybrids, they're a few hundred kilograms heavier than a similar sized non-hybrid car.
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. ;^)
1. Don't loot the road maintenance budget to fund other projects. Next time you want to add a feature, put it on the ballot and tell everyone that taxes are going up to pay for it. And then take ONLY the EXTRA funds collected by the raise to pay for your project. Leave the existing programs alone or you'll starve them and they'll fall appart.
2. The queue is long because you don't fill any of the holes. They sit there for months. If you have so many holes that you leave them there for months then clearly you need more people filling the holes. Yes, that costs money. Like maybe the money that was set aside for road maintenance in the first place before it was looted. As to closing streets, do it at night. Why is it that public officials make average citizens look like rocket scientists? This shit is obvious. Lots of businesses do disruptive activities at night. For example, grocery stores restock goods at around 2AM so they don't disrupt customers during the day. Why close a busy street in the middle of rush hour to fill a pothole? Oh that's right, because the transit union charges extra for the night shift. Which is one of many reasons we shouldn't even have a transit union in the fist place. It should just be subcontracted to construction companies that are more then competent to run around with asphalt and fill in some god damn holes. As to permission to fill the holes, you have to be kidding me. The communities are begging to get the holes filled. Recently we offered to fill them in ourselves and the city threatened us with legal action if we did it ourselves. So no. Permission is not an issue unless the permission is from the city to for it to do it's f'ing job.
3. I can't speak for every place on earth. But in my city, it's one hundred percent laziness. They could fill them on contract very easily. License a bunch of small construction companies and pay them PER pothole. Set a flat rate for pothole filling and then rather then paying someone per hour, overtime, health benifits, etc... you're just paying a flat rate for each hole. Lots of companies would jump at that.
You create jobs in the city. The city saves money. The potholes get filled. Everyone wins.
There's no counter argument to that.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
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!
Oh like cars in the 50s were light? Have you seen what a 1956 Cadillac looks like? It's an all steel boat on wheels. Don't tell me the cars today are too heavy. That's just whining. Yes, cars in the 1980s were lighter then today. They mostly got heavier when the safety standards were changed which required more steel reinforcement. That's like the utilities saying we use too much water or use too much electricity. We use less water per capita then we did 50 years ago and apparently we're still too wasteful for the local utilities.
Funny that this wasn't a problem 50 years ago. What changed? Oh, the population doubled a few times and they didn't build any new dams or aqueducts to handle the population increase. So is the problem really that we use too much water or that there are too many people in this region for the infrastructure to handle? See, if that's their game they should either restrict new construction once they hit saturation or they should... you know... maybe build some new facilities.
Sorry if I'm coming off crazy and angry... I'm just fed up with this stupid crap.
Fill the pot holes. Offer it on commission if you must. It will probably cost less that way. Just offer construction companies a flat rate to fill each hole. Magically the streets will be free of pot holes overnight as about thousand construction companies all run of in a thousand different directions and together fill all the potholes.
I love that they'll leave a stupid pothole unfilled for months sometimes on the grounds that they're thinking about doing roadwork soon. Never mind that the pot hole shouldn't cost more then a couple hundred bucks to fill max and that the damage done to cars in that time period is magnitudes of whatever the city is saving.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Not if you do it at night which is the only time you should ever do it.
Grocery stores restock at around 2AM. If they can get 20 guys to show up in a truck every night to unload and restock the shelves in a SINGLE store... I should think the city should be able to fill some god damn pot holes in the wee hours of the night. This is not complicated. It's obvious and easy.
Businesses across the country do disruptive things at night. Most server updates don't happen during business hours. They happen at midnight or 2 am.
If practically every business does this already, why can't the city? And don't give me that it's too many people. Think about how many people it takes to restock every grocery store in the city every night? That workforce ALONE dwarfs what the city would need to take care of pot holes several times over. And bargain grocery stores find the practice entirely economical.
The problem is not the asphalt. The problem is the city, the transit unions, and people that find it acceptable to leave pot holes unfilled for months on end.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
There's no counter argument to that.
There's always a counter argument.
If you fill the potholes, property values would go up, and with them property taxes. I am firmly against your plan to raise taxes. You must be some sort of democrat.
<Complete your profile by adding a signature!>
Grocery stores restock at around 2AM. If they can get 20 guys to show up in a truck every night to unload and restock the shelves in a SINGLE store... I should think the city should be able to fill some god damn pot holes in the wee hours of the night.
That's not how it works. The night crew is like five or six people, unless it's a 24 hour store in a busy area. But in a non-busy area even for a whole Safeway store you only need a half-dozen people. A guy shows up and unloads a truck with a pallet jack and the midnight down crew breaks down the shipment and stocks and faces the shelves.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Gas was so cheap then it didn't matter. Good times.
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Gasoline_inflation_chart.htm
Inflation adjusted gas prices in the 1950s seems to be pretty average, and higher than they were in the 1990s.