A New Integrated Scheme for Urban Road Traffic Flood Control Using Liquid Air Spray/Vaporization Technology

Dawei Wu, Wenhui Zhang, Li Tang and Cunquan Zhang
Additional contact information
Dawei Wu: School of Traffic and Transportation, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
Wenhui Zhang: School of Traffic and Transportation, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, China
Li Tang: Intelligent Transport System Research Center, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430063, China
Cunquan Zhang: School of Energy and Power Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan 430063, China

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 7, 1-18

Abstract: With the rapid progress of urbanization, cities’ demands for traffic flood control are steadily on the increase, and people are gradually paying more attention to traffic safety and environmental issues. Considering the considerable convenience and service ability of liquid air and corresponding products, people have begun to switch to using liquid air as an emergency coolant. However, this air’s cryogenic operation and vigorous vaporization expansion restricts its widespread application. Our study explores innovative applications based on liquid air spray/evaporation icing and natural melting, which can be applied to urban flood protection. This study also includes a brief introduction to the nature of liquid air and road icing, a conceptual design based on liquid air flash evaporation (for urban flood protection), and the modeling and solving of natural road ice melting. This paper introduces many innovative key technologies, which include the rapid solidification of floods to form emergency ice dams or diversion channels and the application of liquid air spray to form icy roads for the temporary passage of small cars or pickup trucks. Additionally, the economic estimations are performed by using downtown traffic flood control in Wuhan as an example to showcase our innovative scheme for applying liquid air spray/vaporization for urban traffic flooding control, which is practical, pollution free, and cost effective. Our innovative scheme will be promising for flood control in modern cities.

Keywords: liquid air; road traffic engineering; liquid air spray/vaporization; icing and natural de-icing; urban traffic flooding control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2733/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/7/2733/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:7:p:2733-:d:339413

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().