Abstract:
Large amount of salts are used in cold regions every winter to keep users of roads, parking lots and sidewalks safe. While effective for snow and ice control, salts at high concentrations are detrimental to the environment and corrosive to vehicles and infrastructure. Therefore, reducing the salt usage, with new technologies such as pretreating, and substituting the conventional chloride salts with alternative materials (organic based) are necessary. This paper presents the field test results on the deicing performance of coarse and fine salt pretreated with alternative agents of Snowmelt, Fusion and Safepaw. The performance of pretreated salts was field evaluated under a wide variety of weather conditions. Additionally, the performance of the coarse salt and fine salt was also compared. The analysis indicated that pre-treating salt with alternative liquids did not increase the deicing effectiveness significantly under the experienced winter conditions. Also, it was observed that fine salt (with smaller particles) was more effective in increasing pavement clearing speed than coarse salt (with larger particles).
Contributors: Hosseini F, Hossain S M K, Fu L, Li D S.
Link(s) for the Article: Journal Website | ResearchGate