Numerical Analysis of Solar Roadways using ANSYS

Abstract

Today there are more consequences in climate change due to over utilization of fossil fuels thus leading to serious impact on environment. So there is a need for an alternative solution to reduce the consumption of such non – renewable resources. One such effort made in the field of Highway is the development of “Solar Roadways” which can be an alternative solution. Solar roads combine different solution in one – it can help us to improve the production of electricity using solar panels, to provide a digital platform for our future nation’s projects like Smart Cities and to facilitate the emerging electric cars that replaces the petrol driven vehicles and much more. This approach through this paper can offer many additional benefits to the people, environment and will contribute for the sustainable development to a larger extent. A rural road incorporating solar panels has been fabricated and a finite element analysis of the model of pavement is done using ANSYS software and loads for rural roads are applied as per IRC standards. Parameters such as stress, strain and deformation are investigated and it is found that the results are well within the permissible limits.