Enhance Europe – Energy Harvesting Collectors for Urban Road Pavement

The main objectives of the Enhance Europe project concern a system that would be able to collect and convert solar energy into internal energy in a liquid medium, transferring the stored energy to a liquid (water) for domestic/sanitary hot water production or for domestic heating in order to reduce the use of fossil fuels for domestic/sanitary hot water production. The energy harvesting system, embedded in the pavements under a thin layer of asphalt, is expected to capture and reuse renewable solar energy for heating buildings through integrated conversion technologies. The feasibility of the system has been successfully evaluated on a laboratory scale thanks to research developed at the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering of the University of Padua, Italy (UNIPD).