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, 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.

Stormwater runoff from traditional, non-porous pavement systems — particularly parking lots — significantly pollute our rivers, lakes and estuaries. Alternative porous pavement systems allow polluted water to pass through into the natural sub-base.

The porous pavement research at UVM focuses on the effects of winter surface applications (salt and sand) on infiltration capacity, and also examines the effects of weathering. The work is being conducted by Mandar Dewoolkar, assistant professor of engineering, George Pinder, professor of mathematics and statistics, and engineering graduate student George McCain, and is funded by the TRC. More information about this research project can be found on this TRC research poster. (PDF).

Information: Karen Glitman, karen.glitman@uvm.edu, 656-9892.