Traffic Monitoring with a Self-sensing Concrete Nanotechnology Road Surface

Many communities in the U.S. and Europe have started to integrate intelligent transport systems (ITS) into their transportation system infrastructure to help monitor and manage traffic flow and reduce congestion. These systems also provide transportation professionals with the tools to collect, analyze, and archive data that helps assess the performance of these systems. One important part of these ITS are traffic flow sensors that provide real-time information for services and applications like traffic signal control, toll road metering, or onboard navigation systems. Accuracy and reliability of traffic flow sensors has a significant impact on the usefulness of ITS.

Researchers have now developed a self-sensing nanotechnology composite material for traffic monitoring by using piezoresistive multi-walled carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as an admixture. In experiments, they studied the response of the piezoresistive properties of this composite to compressive stress and they investigated with vehicular loading experiments the feasibility of using self-sensing CNT/cement composite for traffic monitoring.

"Our experimental results indicate that there are good corresponding relationships between compressive stress and the electrical resistance of the self-sensing CNT/cement composite," Xun Yu tells Nanowerk. "Our self-sensing CNT/cement composite also presented remarkable responses to vehicular loadings. These findings indicate that this self-sensing nanocomposite cement has great potential for traffic monitoring use such as in vehicle detection, weigh-in-motion measurement and vehicle speed detection."

Yu, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical & Industrial Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, together with his collaborators has reported these findings in the October 7, 2009 online issue of Nanotechnology