Project description
Heating ribbons help melt snow on road
Fog. Ice cover. Pavement frost. Swirling snow. These are just some of the winter conditions that cause traffic delays and accidents. Current solutions range from clearing snow and salting pavements, but these measures have low response times and damage traffic surfaces, cause vehicle corrosion and are also bad for the environment. The EU-funded Snowless project proposes a snow melting solution. It is using amorphous alloy heating ribbons that are embedded in pavements and a completely automatic control unit with real-time dynamic response. Segmented heating zones ensure real-time response (15 minutes from automatic snow/ice detection), low annual operational costs and almost no maintenance. The Snowless solution is also eco-friendly, prevents asphalt cracking, reduces the temperature amplitude and promotes self-healing in the asphalt.
Objective
Winter conditions on roads cause traffic delays that cost 1% of EU GDP and 1,000 causalities annually. Similarly, snow fall causes air traffic disturbance that can cost €57.3M per storm. For pedestrians it a major health issue as an increase of 25% increase in hospitalization and 33% rise in cases of hip fractures is observed during winter season. Current solutions suffer from many shortcomings. The most popular, plowing and salting, is manual, has low response times, damages traffic surfaces, vehicle corrosion and environment pollution. To answer this need we have developed SNOWLESS, a snow melting solution comprising of our proprietary amorphous alloy heating ribbons that are embedded in pavements and completely automatic control unit with real-time dynamic response. Our prioritization scheme for segmented heating zones ensures real-time response (15 minutes from automatic snow/ice detection), low annual operational costs of €1.2/m2 almost no maintenance, 30-60% reduction power consumption. Our solution is environmentally friendly, prevents asphalt cracking by reducing the temperature amplitude and promotes self-healing in the asphalt itself. Our commercialization targets Scandinavia, Central Europe and North America, a market worth €1.75B for shopping malls, roads, pedestrian walkways and airports driven by demand for sustainable snow removal alternative. SNOWLESS has already been implemented in parking lots, successfully reducing operational costs, with the installations generating €1.5M in sales over the last 3 years. We intend commercialize SNOWLESS 3 years after development, ideally by 2021 in 2 phases, with initial introduction to shopping mall parkings which have less stringent requirements and then progress to difficult applications such airports and road infrastructure. We anticipate a revenue and profit of €50M and €15M respectively coming from sales over 5 years, creating 21 employment opportunities in the process.
Fields of science
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringcontrol systems
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsrenewable energy
- engineering and technologymaterials engineeringcoating and films
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementemployment
- natural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsmathematical model
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
IA - Innovation actionCoordinator
Haifa
Israel
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.