Make your car melt snow?

[Arugela]

I have seen shampooing vacuums that direct heat beneath them to help to dry the carpet via directing the engines heat down at it. Do cars have the ability to be made to do the same under the vehicle to melt a driveway? I wonder if skirts or engine mods could be used to make it get rid of your snow. Preferably relatively quickly to get a driveway melted hassle free. I assume the quicker the cheaper the gas cost. 8)

It would be a very good function for a car to get in, start the engine, hit a button to direct heat down, and then sit and wait for the snow to melt. Not sure how this hasn't been thought and implemented before. We could do this as we drive technically and outside of implementing ways to stop ice melt, all the cars on the road could slowly melt the ice and save on dedicated snow truck time.

could we melt freeways and roads this way? Could we do it safely?

Edited February 3, 2022 by Arugela

[magnemoe]

Could probably be done in  an driveway but not on a roads as they are way to slow and energy consuming. You are better off moving the snow out of the way with plows or snowblowers then remove it mechanical or use salt or sand who is most common, salt on main roads and sand on side roads who get little traffic. Now here in Norway its not uncommon to have stairs using leftover heat from water heating to melt snow there and expect electrical heating in the driveway is more effective than having the car doing it as you are heating from the top who is much less efficient. 

[cubinator]

I think it would take hours of moving your car slowly from one spot to the next to melt a whole driveway like that, and waste a whole lot of fuel.

If everyone does this, the snow will probably eventually melt anyway because the CO2 deposited in the atmosphere will warm Earth sufficiently to not have as much snow anymore.

Edited February 3, 2022 by cubinator

[Arugela]

39 minutes ago, cubinator said:

I think it would take hours of moving your car slowly from one spot to the next to melt a whole driveway like that, and waste a whole lot of fuel.

If everyone does this, the snow will probably eventually melt anyway because the CO2 deposited in the atmosphere will warm Earth sufficiently to not have as much snow anymore.

That would technically be a viable long term solution then. 8)

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

Um.  No. 

I mean, technically you could fiddle with the exhaust pipe (jetting out a 3inch stream of 600-900 degree air and get some narrow melting - but the minute you try to increase the coverage area you lose all the heat during expansion 

https://www.physlink.com/education/askexperts/ae454.cfm

So no. 

[HebaruSan]

Fun facts about cars, snow, and driveways:

• The part of the driveway under the car won't accumulate snow, because the snow falls on the car instead!
• You want to clear the parts of the driveway between the car and the road (so the car can drive away), and between the car and you (so you can get to the car); what these places have in common is that there is not a car there to melt anything
• Roads need to be cleared before any cars are on them (plows excepted), because driving on ice and snow tends to be dangerous

Edited February 4, 2022 by HebaruSan

[StrandedonEarth]

2 hours ago, Arugela said:

could we melt freeways and roads this way? Could we do it safely?

 

3 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:

The part of the driveway under the car won't accumulate snow, because the snow falls on the car instead!

Cover (roof) the freeways with PV panels. When conditions are good, they generate power for the charging tations. When conditions are bad (i.e. snow) and no power is being generated, at least they are still sheltering the road, keeping snow and rain off it.

[Nuke]

they actually heat some parking lots to keep them clear of snow. you really only need to keep the surface just above the freezing point i think to do that they just lay down an insulative material, put in coolant loop and pour concrete or asphalt on top of it. of course this is energy intensive and doing it for the whole road network would really use a lot of energy.

[AngrybobH]

3 hours ago, Nuke said:

they actually heat some parking lots to keep them clear of snow

When I lived in a much colder part of the world my neighbor had a driveway like that. I was envious because all I had was a cheap shovel.

Also, car engines try to use all the heat they make to push the pistons down not make things warm. They are not very efficient heaters.

[Shpaget]

Melting ice requires a huge amount of energy. You may think that heating water is energy intensive, but just melting a chunk of ice without warming it up (transitioning from 0°C ice to 0°C water) takes about the same energy as heating up that same amount of water from 0°C to almost 80°C.

Edited February 4, 2022 by Shpaget

[kerbiloid]

My notebook melts the cup of ice-cream faster than my desktop.

This looks ambiguous.

The same about cars.

[K^2]

12 hours ago, Arugela said:

could we melt freeways and roads this way? Could we do it safely?

Sure. We shouldn't, though. Energy requirements are going to be very high, and lets not make the climate even worse than it already is.

[Gargamel]

You don't want to thermally melt snow on a roadway.   In a lot of places, the temperatures can drop down below what a heater system can keep up with.   If you have standing melt water on the road, oh looky, now we have a skating rink!  And even if it stays warm enough to not refreeze on the road surface, that warming system only extends out so far.   The snow will build up on the edges, and under the right conditions, now you have canals!

Physical removal of snow is the only way to deal with it.   Have the trucks dump the chemicals (salt, beet brine, etc) to prevent ice buildup, but keep those plows on the road (They're the same truck, so it's not hard).   If your system requires physical removal to supplement the melting system, then your system is backwards.   Having melting systems to supplement the physical removal. 

 

[kerbiloid]

If start adding the salt to the petrol, every car will be spreading it with the engine exhaust.

Так победим! This way we'll win!

Edited February 4, 2022 by kerbiloid

[Nuke]

19 hours ago, AngrybobH said:

When I lived in a much colder part of the world my neighbor had a driveway like that. I was envious because all I had was a cheap shovel.

Also, car engines try to use all the heat they make to push the pistons down not make things warm. They are not very efficient heaters.

well something like 75% (i got that number from an actual engineer) of the energy goes to waste heat. problem is hot things like to go up in the air, not down in the road. i supposed if you pointed the radiators down and added really powerful fans to them, you might be able to speed things along. 

you could probibly try and capture waste heat, and with some really exotic plumbing perhaps you can pump the working fluid through your tires which would need to be designed to be really thermally conductive. never mind that you need to pump a fluid through a bearing to a spinning thing. though i cant imagine that being any more complex than the self inflating tire system on the humvee. tires also have a relatively small contact area with the road, so maybe if you could do the same thing on tank treads, idk, that sounds like really hard engineering.  getting fluid to a spinning tire is one thing. you would probibly need heat exchangers in all the idlers. where a network of heat pipes and tubes connect each of the tread segments (this would be a closed loop, likely pumped by the compression of the tread plates sort of like a peristaltic pump). either way sounds expensive. 

your typical friction interaction between tire and road is usually enough to help melt snow. the roads are the first thing that clears. and that is helped along by salt and other abrasives added to the roadways. 

Edited February 5, 2022 by Nuke

[magnemoe]

10 hours ago, Gargamel said:

You don't want to thermally melt snow on a roadway.   In a lot of places, the temperatures can drop down below what a heater system can keep up with.   If you have standing melt water on the road, oh looky, now we have a skating rink!  And even if it stays warm enough to not refreeze on the road surface, that warming system only extends out so far.   The snow will build up on the edges, and under the right conditions, now you have canals!

Physical removal of snow is the only way to deal with it.   Have the trucks dump the chemicals (salt, beet brine, etc) to prevent ice buildup, but keep those plows on the road (They're the same truck, so it's not hard).   If your system requires physical removal to supplement the melting system, then your system is backwards.   Having melting systems to supplement the physical removal. 

 

This, an very common problem on little used roads and walkways here in Norway, the the snow who is compressed turn into ice then temperature increase. It can get so bad that the fields on the side of the road is free of snow while the road is cowered with ice. 

[Johnmo89]

The idea is interesting, but not promising. The main reason is energy costs. I will explain. An ordinary household hair dryer consumes approximately 0.375 watts for 15 minutes of operation. High-power hair dryer (construction) - about twice as much. For efficient operation, there must be at least 20 nozzles under the bottom of the machine. We get about 17 watts for 15 minutes of work. In order to clean a street 2 km long, it will take about 1.5 hours and we get about 102 watts. For an hour and a half of work. Now imagine that such a system works for several hours every day. And there are dozens of such cars. Plus, there are technical problems (a high temperature under the bottom will contribute to overheating of the vehicle. Sprinkling salt or other chemicals on the snow is much more profitable, easier and cheaper.

[Shpaget]

Your math is all over the place. You're mixing units, have dropped a few orders of magnitude, and your estimates for the time and number of hair driers needed to clean a segment of a road are not supported.

Edited February 10, 2022 by Shpaget

[Johnmo89]

43 minutes ago, Shpaget said:

Your math is all over the place. You're mixing units, have dropped a few orders of magnitude, and your estimates for the time and number of hair driers needed to clean a segment of a road are not supported.

Ok maybe I made some mistakes in my computings. But in any case, all values are approximate. And the main message of my comment is that it is absolutely not profitable. Such a system simply does not have sufficient reliability and potential. In other words, it is too complicated, expensive and impractical. If you do not agree with me, I will be glad to hear your point of view on this matter.