Whether you’re just an occasional driver or the road’s your livelihood, hitting a pothole can be a nuisance just the same, but a recent scientific discovery might make them a thing of the past, and asphalt might even be able to heal itself using an unlikely ingredient: plant spores.
As it happens, scientists from Swansea University and King’s College in London have been working with colleagues from the University of Bío-Bío in Chile on an experimental material obtained from moss, according to a report on February 26.
Specifically, the researchers used machine learning algorithms to model the way in which bitumen (the viscous black mass in asphalt) oxidizes and hardens in response to environmental factors. After it has hardened past a certain threshold, bitumen will crack instead of stretching under heavy loads.
To heal the initial micro-cracks before they can turn into larger ones and, eventually, into potholes, there’s a need to somehow rejuvenate oxidized bitumen, and this is where the plant spores, specifically those from the stag’s horn clubmoss plant (Lycopodium clavatum), can help.
Plant spores to the road rescue
Indeed, the scientists used various chemical treatments to remove the reproductive cells from within these spores, which clubmoss produces and releases as part of its reproductive cycle, loading them up with payloads of sunflower oil, and finally adding them to bitumen used to make small pieces of asphalt.
Once the asphalt samples were exposed to conditions causing micro-cracks in bitumen, the spores would burst and release the sunflower oil, which rejuvenates the oxidized bitumen and causes the cracks to disappear in less than an hour.
According to King’s College London’s Dr. Francisco Martin-Martinez:
“In our research, we want to mimic the healing properties observed in nature. (…) For example, when a tree or animal is cut, their wounds naturally heal over time, using their own biology. Creating asphalt that can heal itself will increase the durability of roads and reduce the need for people to fill in potholes.”
As a reminder, the scientists have been working with the state-of-the-art AI tools of Google Cloud to simulate on a computer the behavior of bitumen under various elements, as well as having developed a new data-driven model to accelerate atomistic simulations, Techgaged.com reported earlier.
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