PolyU researchers’ smart pavements won two awards at iCAN 2020

PolyU and VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd (VTT) collaborated in contributing to an EU-funded project entitled Urban Nature Labs (UNaLab) led by a consortium comprising 29 partners from 15 countries. As part of the UNaLab project, PolyU researchers, led by Professor Yuhong Wang from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Dr. Ivan Wang-Hei Ho from the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, developed “A smart integrated road pavement and drainage system for stormwater storage, de-icing, dust suppression, and cooling”. This project aims to develop integrated pervious concrete pavement systems and their components as part of the nature-based solutions (NBS), and to selectively adopt UNaLab NBS and implement them locally through “living labs”.

This system has won two awards: the Canadian Special Awards and the Organizer’s Choice Awards in the International Invention Innovation Competition in Canada (iCAN 2020). The project, with its innovative designs to change the urban road, aims to make roads more environmentally friendly and to tackle significant challenges brought about by climate change.

The UNaLab consortium is coordinated by VTT, and the research components led by VTT have been funded through the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 Research Scheme, while the research components PolyU is responsible for, were funded separately by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council.

For more details of the system, please click HERE

To access a brief of the H2020 Project UNaLab, please click HERE