A group of high school students learned a bit about the qualities of porous pavement in a lab setting as part of the Summer Transportation Institute, a partnership of the University of Vermont’s Transportation Research Center (TRC) and Upward Bound Program, which is funded by a US Department of Education grant and the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
To conduct the experiment, students secured cylinders of the pavement mixture in a plastic tube and, using beakers of water and stopwatches, recorded the rates at which water ran through it. The students then added road salt and/or sand and repeated the experiment, effectively simulating the qualities of absorption on our northern roadways.
The porous pavement research is being conducted by Dr. Mandar Dewoolkar, Dr. George Pinder, and UVM School of Engineering graduate student George McCain, and is funded by the TRC. View the research poster for this project.
The first STI was held 15 years ago on the campus of South Carolina University with the goal of attracting youth into the transportation industry. The goal remains as important today as we look at the demographic forecast. We know that there are not enough potential transportation workers to meet the needs of tomorrow. The Institute is one way to fill the pipeline for transportation workers.
STI students reside on the UVM campus and spend their days in the classroom, lab and field settings.
For more information please contact Karen Glitman, TRC Project Director.
Last modified July 09 2008 09:37 AM
