Development of a cooling pavement to improve urban energy efficiency.

PRO GEO, together with the companies COMSA and SORIGUÉ, carried out a research and development project with the aim of developing a new sustainable pavement with greater durability by incorporating recycled glass aggregates from recycled asphalt mix (RAP) and by using low energy consumption tempered asphalt mixes.

For this purpose, a test section was built and monitored, for a year, through a meteorological station and auscultations. A software was developed to estimate the reduction in ambient temperature and a Thermo-Hydraulic Modeling (THM) was carried out to calibrate the results.

PRO GEO’s experience has allowed us to carry out the following aspects:

• Establishment of the requirements that new materials must accomplish and adaptation of the new thermal characterization tests for bituminous mixtures.
• Design of a test section and a monitoring system.
• Instrumentation results analysis.
• THM modeling to reproduce and calibrate the obtained results.
• Development of a software that allows to estimate ambient temperature reduction taking into account the mixture composition and the environmental variables.

This project has been partially financed by the CDTI (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial).