Solar FREAKIN' Roadways

[evensgrey]

Wow. Just wow. Another creationist tactic!

I wasn't "defending the glass roadway" (I was NEVER doing that, actually, so thanks for the False Dichotomy as well); I was pointing out YET AGAIN how WRONG you were about how the LEDS would have to work!

And you STILL can't admit it!

No, I showed you were wrong with BASIC MATH. You gave the lumens PER SQUARE METER in an attempt to show that sunlight is too bright for LEDs to overpower. I pointed out that LEDs were much smaller: if they're a square centimeter (they're probably smaller than that), then that's 1/10,000th of the lumens per square meter that they'd need to overcome.

THERE ARE NO FUCKING SIGNS!!! CAN'T YOU FUCKING READ??? I've pointed out TWICE now that it's the LEDs THEMSELVES that light up in a pattern to make the sign--they don't illuminate ANYTHING!!! They just need to be bright enough to be visible themselves!

Geez...

Indeed, your random jabbering doesn't help your cause at all, and neither does your refusal to abandon your claim of having LED TVs and similar displays, devices that do not actually EXIST, and your demand that I accept that you have them.  (Incidentally, LCD TVs have this interesting device in them called a diffusion plate that will quite readily diffuse the sunlight coming in from the font and send it back out.  I expect the fact that the light is already colored by coming in through the LCD plane will result in the image degrading somewhat, but the effect shouldn't be too bad.)

Do try to be more coherent:  You ended by first declaring that there would be no signs, and then explaining how the signs you just declared wouldn't exist would be generated.

The problem (which you have refused to not completely ignore until UI admit you possess non-existent devices) is that these signs (that you have both described the generation of and declared to not be generated at all) will be behind frosted glass.  This means you have all kinds of severe problems with illuminating them brightly enough to be seen in daylight with far less intensity per square centimeter than the floodlight you keep using as your only brightness reference.

Unless you are willing to admit that the glass road cannot generate enough power to operate the lighting system it is assumed to be using, you have to limit the power use to something like 600 to 800 watt-hours per square meter per day, because that's what it could generate on near-Solstice days in a large portion of the US, if the LEDs occupy a negligible part of the available surface and solar cells occupy effectively all of it (which you cannot do due to the problems that would create in trying to fix down the glass tile paving).  That's before attempting to account for losses due to the battery system used, the effect of the snow and ice cover on the road surface, and the portion of available sunlight lost due to the frosted surface itself simply redirecting the light away again. (We cannot ignore the fact that some areas will still have significant shading from vegetation in winter, and from the road being in cuttings that shade it when the sun is low in the sky, but those are more localized problems that degrade the overall utility from what the above does, and the above problems already make it pretty worthless.)

The further I look at this technology, the more clear it becomes that it makes absolutely no sense to try and build a road out of glass tiles covering a layer of solar cells, both because glass tiles make absolutely no sense as a paving material in any case and putting solar cells in such a location would so compromise their ability to collect energy that it wouldn't let you do anything useful to power displays embedded in the road.

Get something OTHER than glass tiles to use for the paving, and you might have a system that would work.  Glass creates far to many problems for this to be workable on any level, particularly as glass absolutely fails as a paving material.  You can't have a successful solar road if it fundamentally fails to work as a road.

[evensgrey]

[yt]LvYv62X-DD0[/yt]

You haven't actually WATCHED any of Tf00t's videos on the subject, have you.

[Travis Retriever]

You haven't actually WATCHED any of Tf00t's videos on the subject, have you.

Well, if Shane and your exchange about it was any indicator it would be a waste of my time.

[MrBogosity]

You haven't actually WATCHED any of Tf00t's videos on the subject, have you.

I watched all of them.

[evensgrey]

Well, if Shane and your exchange about it was any indicator it would be a waste of my time.

Yes, if you're really into this government-funded boondoggle, they would be.

[Travis Retriever]

Yes, if you're really into this government-funded boondoggle, they would be.

Never said I was, in fact, my very first post on the subject:

If it can be made viable, awesome.  I still prefer nuclear power myself, but hey, take what you can get.

Also, this is the first time *anybody* has said this is a government boondoggle.  Even if that's true, it doesn't mean the technology itself = wrong/bad/a waste of resources or whatever, anymore than government funding of ENIAC and APRANET means computers and the internet respectively are a bad idea.

[MrBogosity]

Also, this is the first time *anybody* has said this is a government boondoggle.

It's amazing how they pulled that out at the 11th hour, isn't it? And gee, someone tries to develop a new kind of road, and it's a government boondoggle because we live in a society where 99% of the roads are government-funded.

(Notice how none of them have followed up with, "And that's why government shouldn't fund roads"! As always, it's what's NOT being said that's the most telling...)

[evensgrey]

It's amazing how they pulled that out at the 11th hour, isn't it? And gee, someone tries to develop a new kind of road, and it's a government boondoggle because we live in a society where 99% of the roads are government-funded.

(Notice how none of them have followed up with, "And that's why government shouldn't fund roads"! As always, it's what's NOT being said that's the most telling...)

You mean like how you have absolutely no response to ANY of the numerous fatal problems already pointed out with paving roads with window glass?

Incidentally, what kind of bearing strength do solar cells have?  This matters, since they plan to go to 100% solar cell coverage, meaning that the cells will not only have to be permanently bonded to the glass, they will have to take the load of the road.  So will the circuit boards, whatever they make them out of.

I'm also wondering why they plan to light up the road a half mile ahead of cars when the maximum viewing distance for the LEDs is less than a hundred yards.  (Work out the angles for a 12 mm thick plate based on a reasonable viewing distance above the road surface, not forgetting that the still-unaddressed question of how the tiles will be gasketed to prevent water and road debris from entering the electronics layer and shorting out the road.)

The absurdity of the developers doesn't seem to have limits.  They've written semi-coherent descriptions of air dropping glass road tiles into Afghanistan (which then both release and retract their parachutes before deploying such devices as cameras, microphones, and satellite communication dishes).  They talk of distribution by trains powered by the road tiles they carry (never mind that they plan on only producing low-voltage DC power and locomotives need high voltage).  They completely ignore the MASSIVE increase in generating capacity required to feed the huge amounts of power the glass roads will consume, since they don't plan to have any storage systems incorporated in the glass roads and the roads can't, even with their outright wrong calculations, produce anything like as much power as they would consume.  They ignore the huge cost of building low-voltage DC power distribution systems (this is not something engineering can overcome, this is pure physics, relating to what is physically required to carry the large currents needed to transfer large quantities of power with low voltages) that are rather longer than existing power grids, as they would have to be built beside all glass roads.  They ignore the fact that tempered glass will shatter if it gets sufficiently badly SCRATCHED, and they outright lie about the scratch resistance of glass compared to asphalt concrete (the technically correct term for the composite used in road paving).  They've outright lied about having already passed impact and load tests, since they've produced precisely 0 units of their proposed production design (with the radical increase in solar cell coverage from about 35% to 100%, with what that means for the structure of the tiles) which could have been used in testing.

Don't forget that the only price they've dared to produce is $10000 per prototype tile.  That's going to need a 99% cost reduction before ANYONE will be willing to even consider this for paving anything.  (Sidewalks, for comparison, typically have a total cost of only a few dollars per square foot.  Replacing the standard concrete with a paving material that costs more than a hundred times as much as a standard sidewalk is not going to go anywhere.  It isn't much better for driveways and parking lots, which generally run no more than a few tens of dollars per square foot.  Their quoted cost of $4.4 million per road mile appears to just be for the glass paving, and ignores the fact that complete road construction can cost anywhere from $1 million to $10 million in the lower 48 depending on local conditions, and the pavement costs pretty close to the same for all of them, the difference being how much it costs to build a stable road bed.  This means we're talking somewhere between 4 and 10 times the price of asphalt, despite the fact that it won't last nearly as long and cannot be recycled like asphalt is.  Repair of a glass road means replacing not only the shattered tile, but replacing any adjacent tiles significantly different in elevation from the replaced tile as well.

And all this after you ignore the fact that the only reason they started this project was because there was a government grant they wanted to get.  They actually SAY THAT WAS WHY THEY DID IT.  Had you bothered watching Tf00t's first video, you would have already known about this.

[MrBogosity]

I wasn't the one who claimed there were no LEDs visible in direct sunlight, and then, when told otherwise, denied it tooth and nail, even when one was showed to him, and then, finally when he could deny it no longer, immediately moved the goal posts.

Nope, wasn't me...

[evensgrey]

I wasn't the one who claimed there were no LEDs visible in direct sunlight, and then, when told otherwise, denied it tooth and nail, even when one was showed to him, and then, finally when he could deny it no longer, immediately moved the goal posts.

Nope, wasn't me...

Yes, you were the one pretending that a FLOOD LIGHT was a valid brightness brightness reference for a VIDEO SCREEN that doesn't even exist.

You also pretended that LED traffic lights are visible in sunlight, and screeched about how they aren't shaded.  Now, here's an interesting image to look at about that.



That's the very image that the developers use to support that very same claim.  Notice the SHADOWS FROM THE SUNSHADES.  Also notice how the image was selected for the apparent purpose of trying to disguise the existence of the sunshades they are lying about.  I've never seen an LED traffic signal without them.  The LED billboards, incidentally, not only have a fairly narrow viewing angle, they also happen to be BLACK, creating the exact same effect as shading them would:  Dark background for the LEDs to show up against.  (If you want to pretend otherwise, find an LED billboard that isn't black first.  They don't exist because it would be stupid.)  Your glass roads are going to be WHITE because of all the scratches on the surface caused by all the dirt being rubbed into the panels by the traffic.

Incidentally, your comment about how the scratches wouldn't decrease light transmittance was pure ignorance.  What color is a back-lit piece of frosted glass?  White.  What color is a front-lit piece of frosted glass?  White.  The frosting, like the scratches, scatters the light in all directions.  At a distance of 12 mm or a little more on a 500 mm wide tile, little light will be absorbed by the currently unknown gasket that will be needed to prevent road debris and water from entering the electronics layer, but about half the incident light will simply be scattered upwards.  The glare question from this is interesting.  There will be little specular reflection as the surface is pretty matte, but it will still be unpleasant driving into the sun at a low sun angle, considerably worse than on a dark grey weathered asphalt surface (probably like a wet asphalt surface, which gets painful fast if the sun is low and on the road direction).

[MrBogosity]

Yes, you were the one pretending that a FLOOD LIGHT was a valid brightness brightness reference for a VIDEO SCREEN that doesn't even exist.

Now you're just LYING. The video screen EXISTS. I've used them before. I showed you one. The studio light didn't have the FIRST FUCKING THING to do with the screen! It's for lighting subjects. A single LED, FAR brighter than you said was available.

And you also didn't have the first fucking clue how LED-backlit screens work, you were actually ridiculous enough to say that sunlight HELPS you see them, I had to school you on that, and now, JUST LIKE A FUCKING CREATIONIST, you're pretending that I'M the one who didn't know and that YOU schooled ME. BULLSHIT.

I refuse to discuss this any more with you if you're going to continue to be dishonest.

[dallen68]

If you look at the panels for the proposed roads, they are textured, they also appear to be green. Also, there's no reason the technology wouldn't continue to evolve, esp. with public investment (not talking about the gov't kind ). For all we know, by the time this comes about for a real world test (other wise known as beta testing) the panels will be made out of a semi-transparent silicate composite.

[evensgrey]

Now you're just LYING. The video screen EXISTS. I've used them before. I showed you one. The studio light didn't have the FIRST FUCKING THING to do with the screen! It's for lighting subjects. A single LED, FAR brighter than you said was available.

And you also didn't have the first fucking clue how LED-backlit screens work, you were actually ridiculous enough to say that sunlight HELPS you see them, I had to school you on that, and now, JUST LIKE A FUCKING CREATIONIST, you're pretending that I'M the one who didn't know and that YOU schooled ME. BULLSHIT.

I refuse to discuss this any more with you if you're going to continue to be dishonest.

You've showed a FLOODLIGHT ONLY (which more detailed images than you showed appears to have a cluster of LEDs, as I previously pointed out to you), and your claims indicate that you didn't know the difference between what an LED display and an LCD with LED backlighting.  The most obvious difference between them is an LED display isn't made, since they could serve no purpose on anything small enough to carry around.  LCD displays can be designed to work almost as well in direct sunlight as they do under normal conditions of use, and without the massive increase in power draw that an actual LED display would have when switched to a sunlight mode (which is the absolute last thing anyone would want in portable, and hence normally battery powered, equipment).

You showed a FLOODLIGHT when you were asked about the LED-generated DISPLAYS you were claiming to have.  You were told that you had to produce makes and models or they didn't exist, and you didn't, demonstrating that you don't have them and know they don't exist.  You even demonstrated not knowing the difference between an LED display and and LCD display with LED backlighting when pretending that my pointing out they are entirely different things was moving the goalposts.

You weaseled on about the unimportant side topic of the brighter LEDs that the ELECTRICAL ENGINEER who invented the glass road never thought to use until AFTER he discovered the relatively low level of light emitted by normal LEDs (and since something he SHOULD know about entirely escaped his attention, the question of just how many of the things an electrical engineer wouldn't be expected to know about roads, which have several engineering specialties behind them, have been ignored and are fatal problems that haven't been thought up yet) to avoid trying to defend your claim that WINDOW GLASS is a perfectly good paving material.

Tf00t demonstrated that window glass is not a good paving material.  He demonstrated that using toughened window glass doesn't actually help, and creates ideal conditions to have entire tiles catastrophically fail from minor impacts of critical (and common) materials like broken porcelain.  (Imagine what's going to happen when a chunk of porcelain gets picked up by a vehicle tire and hammered into a few hundred tiles.  In any medium-sized city, you can expect multiple incidents per day.  It doesn't need to be porcelain, either.  I've seen toughened glass shattered from a hammer blow, and in windshields it shatters under the impact of a human under medium speed crash conditions.  Toughened glass is great UNLESS there's something that can damage it, like, say, any part of a crashing car that strikes the road surface.  Or some larger hailstones.  Those things can hit with greater force than a human's head in a medium speed car crash, and recorded sizes in extreme weather events are up to baseball size.)

You've never even pretended to deal with the colossal cost of not only the extremely expensive paving material they want to use, but the massive conventional generating capacity needed to provide the huge quantity of electricity the glass roads would use (as Tf00t demonstrated, several times the current usage of the US would be consumed for the road heating if all the heat just went into melting the snow and ice, never mind heating it from the actual ambient temperature, and losses to the atmosphere directly).  You couldn't even use nuclear plants to generate the power because it would vary too fast for the slow power response of nuclear plants.  It would have to be done with coal fired plants (there simply isn't enough oil or gas production available to produce the quantity of power needed, and hydroelectric is already on most of the good places to put it as well as a lot of questionable ones and the few that are left are being fiercely opposed due to the huge environmental impact they have).  Far from being environmentally beneficial, glass roads would cause a vast increase in pollution.  (And the pollution from making them hasn't even been considered, nor the cost of the waste they produce.  What are we going to do with the heaps of glass fragments we're going to get from all the shattering tiles?  What about all the pollution from making the electronics and the scrapping of the electronics when the tiles shatter?)

They made the trivially false claim of having passed all testing while not actually having made any of the proposed production version at all.  Perhaps they tested just the glass tiles, without the electronics package underneath it.  The apparently bolted down tiles would never pass any kind of realistic surface stability test for the reason Tf00t showed diagrammatically in his first video (which you now claim to have watched, while before commenting that you couldn't be bothered to watch all the way through), the fact that differential forces as the load of vehicle tires moves across the tiles would act to loosen them (which is a reason to not use any sort of tiles as a road surface, it takes big slabs to avoid this effect) but also because any kind of fastener merely creates small areas that have to take the entire load stress applied, which makes the effective strength of the system the strength of just the loaded area.  This is why WELDING or GLUING (with appropriate adhesives) is stronger than BOLTS or NAILS: Spreading the load over a larger area makes the connection stronger.

Checking their web site for future redesign of their glass road shows they plan to make the solar cells load bearing by placing them over the whole area of the tile.  This means the effective strength of the tile is now the strength of the solar cells, at the most.  If the cells break mechanically, the tile breaks mechanically.  If the circuit board breaks mechanically, the tile breaks mechanically.  (Notice how we're not even dealing with the paving surface here, but the internal structure of the pavement tiles.  These need to be at least as strong in compression and tension as the glass plates, and bonded with an optically clear adhesive of similar strength, or the tiles will separate at the weaker layer.  Yes, there are conductive glasses, but solar cells aren't glass, they're all semiconductor materials that have quite different mechanical properties from glass.  The glass, the solar cells, the conductor traces, the optically clear adhesive that's as strong as tempered glass, and the circuit board, whatever that would be made out of that's as strong as tempered glass, would all also have to have sufficiently close coefficients of expansion that the hundred-degree-plus Fahrenheit temperature variations the tiles will regularly be exposed to won't make them shear apart.  (That's harder than it sounds.  If the joints crack at all, the changing stress on the tiles will tend to spread the cracking until the whole tile splits apart.  See, there's a REASON for not using materials with radically dissimilar properties in some applications.)

This is just some of the faults with the idea of glass roadways that amateurs can point out (and you will, no doubt, completely ignore, just as you have all the other times it's been pointed out why this is a really stupid idea).  Can you IMAGINE how many hundreds of catastrophic engineering faults glass roads will be found to have if engineers who actually know about roads and the require materials properties of their components get tasked with examining this nonsense?  (I expect you will only read a single sentence, just as you did the last time, and hope nobody notices all the stuff you ignored.)

[MrBogosity]

You've showed a FLOODLIGHT ONLY (which more detailed images than you showed appears to have a cluster of LEDs,

No, LIAR, a SINGLE LED, as the picture made clear. This was pointed out to you at the time. You STILL can't stop yourself from lying, can you?

and your claims indicate that you didn't know the difference between what an LED display and an LCD with LED backlighting.

BULLSHIT. NOT AT ALL. You only came up with that bullshit after I showed you how incredibly ignorant you are.

An LED-backlit LCD screen that is visible in daylight MUST get its brightness from the LEDs. And AGAIN, the ONLY thing the LCDs are going to do is DIM THE LED LIGHT!

You showed a FLOODLIGHT when you were asked about the LED-generated DISPLAYS you were claiming to have.

No, LIAR, I showed an LED studio light because YOU SAID THERE WERE NO LEDs BRIGHT ENOUGH TO BE SEEN IN DAYLIGHT.

EVERYTHING you have said here is a LIE. We're done.

[MrBogosity]

Here's just one example of what you claim doesn't exist: http://www.smallhd.com/products/dp7-pro/dp7-pro-hb.html

And again, the studio light: http://www.prostudiousa.com/10000-Lumen-LED-Studio-Light-P5407.aspx

As the product description says, that's a single 100-watt LED. And even if they weren't, even if it were an array, it STILL wouldn't help you because the SFWs use arrays and in order for an array to be bright enough the individual LEDs would have to be bright enough, too.

If you're STILL going to lie about the existence of these things and how they show you to be wrong, then you have nothing more to contribute to this conversation.