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.)
Use cheaper tires?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
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
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. ;^)
Now, because it tends to stick on the tires (and the use of mats tends to be expensive over time), I suppose we can mix the pitch with sand and/or fine gravel before filling in the holes - should keep the pothole filled for some years without the need of revisiting it... what a boon for the taxpayers. (hmmm... I think I'm going to patent this)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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!
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!>