A New Approach to Modeling Vehicle-Induced Heat and Its Thermal Effects on Road Surface Temperature

The distribution of vehicle-induced wind velocity in the transversal direction of roads is measured. A statistical analysis is also performed to find the vehicle stopping time and stopping position at traffic signals. These results are used to build a heat-balance model to predict the road surface temperature resulting from the thermal effects of vehicles. To validate the model, measured and calculated road surface temperatures for a free-running (single path) location and a traffic-signal location are compared. The contributions of meteorological and vehicle-induced heat fluxes to the road surface temperature are quantitatively analyzed. For the present traffic and meteorological conditions, the calculated and measured road surface temperatures were in agreement for both the free-running and traffic-signal locations. Furthermore, the thermal contribution of vehicles to the road surface temperature was found to be nonnegligible at both locations.