A New Integrated Scheme for Urban Road Traffic Flood Control Using Liquid Air Spray/Vaporization Technology

With the rapid progress of urbanization, cities’ demands for traffic flood control are steadily on the increase, and people are gradually paying more attention to traffic safety and environmental issues. Considering the considerable convenience and service ability of liquid air and corresponding products, people have begun to switch to using liquid air as an emergency coolant. However, this air’s cryogenic operation and vigorous vaporization expansion restricts its widespread application. Our study explores innovative applications based on liquid air spray/evaporation icing and natural melting, which can be applied to urban flood protection. This study also includes a brief introduction to the nature of liquid air and road icing, a conceptual design based on liquid air flash evaporation (for urban flood protection), and the modeling and solving of natural road ice melting. This paper introduces many innovative key technologies, which include the rapid solidification of floods to form emergency ice dams or diversion channels and the application of liquid air spray to form icy roads for the temporary passage of small cars or pickup trucks. Additionally, the economic estimations are performed by using downtown traffic flood control in Wuhan as an example to showcase our innovative scheme for applying liquid air spray/vaporization for urban traffic flooding control, which is practical, pollution free, and cost effective. Our innovative scheme will be promising for flood control in modern cities. View Full-Text