Mexican student Israel Antonio Briseno Carmona has come up with a brilliant idea to repair roads with rains, ironically the thing that damages roads the most. The national James Dyson Award winner has come up with a rubber road that repairs itself when it rains. A pavement made of tyres that regenerate by absorbing water, the rubber pavement project aims at solving the largest deficit in Mexico.
During the rains, the pavements in Carmona’s hometown get damaged. “The damage is caused by rain filtering to the base of pavements, weakening it and creating subsidence. It takes a lot of time to maintain a damaged street,” adds Carmona, a student of the Coahuila Autonomous University. He observed that when it rains, water filters down the sub-base and creates a fault. When a car goes over it, it collapses. That is when he decided to turn the greatest degradation agent into a recovery agent for his rubber pavement project.
The pavement was inspired by concrete that regenerates with bacteria, transferring its chemical functionalities to the pavement without the use of bacteria. According to Carmona, everything is born from the additives used as there is homogenization with the material and the rubber when they are at high temperature but following the same process of manufacture of the asphalt pavement.
The putty causes regeneration which takes place when rubber and additives are mixed. The putty further gets in contact with the water, thereby creating calcium silicates which are one of the components of the regeneration and healing of the cracks. Carmona informs, “This invention is the reformulation of my original project since I first considered asphalt and other additives but when I observed the possibility of using rubber tyres that contaminate our cities, I determined to improve my project.”
Initially, he tried to use standard asphalt instead of tyre rubber for the project, until he saw the opportunity to replace it with a waste product. Although there are pavements that regenerate, none of them use water as a means of regeneration. At present, Carmona has obtained a patent for his creation under the name Paflec. He is further planning to build a short section of road to build confidence among the masses over his idea. Additionally, he is also in plans to seek approval for it from the national building certification organisation ONNCCE and the Secretariat of Communications and Transportation.