Hi friends,
For a long time I
wanted to talk to you about the five generations of evolution of the roads, but
as you had noticed, I had been really busy trying to get some advance in my project
before starting my Secondment at IFSTTAR (Yes, I will start my Secondment on 24
of April at Nantes).
This
week is Easter in Spain, so, I had some free time to write this. But before starting,
I want to show you a couple of pictures of the “procesiones” here in Granada, a
beautiful tradition Spanish people have.
I
should say that I feel also really lucky to have the opportunity to learn about other culture. As it is well known, a lot of the Spanish traditions where
bring to Latin-America, and in my country (Costa Rica) we have our Easter processions
too, but those are already little different. Sometimes I feel like in home here
in Spain, while in other times I continue learning a lot about the differences
we have. Living in a foreign country is an experience that helps you to grow in
so many different ways.
Ok, coming
back to the title, we can identify 5 generations of evolution of the infrastructure
for roads: the Roman and rustic roads, the paved roads, the high capacity roads
(highways), the sustainable roads (still state of art, but with some applications
already reached in field) and more recently the smart roads (current state of art
in roads research).
Why I wanted to
talk to you about this? Well, because each one of the SMARTI projects are part
of the research efforts frame inside this two lasts generations. In particular,
my project is focused in the necessity to develop smart materials with the
capacity to reproduce the ability of living beings to interact with the
environment in which they are found (as for example self-repairing, interacting
with others living beings and adapting their mechanical performance to the
physical demands –mechanical, electromagnetic and thermals- of the environment
in which they are found).
As I already
explained you in my 3-minutes thesis, I am trying to transform the infrastructure
of roads in an integral system of communication. I am working in giving to them
a language to interact with us and the environment, I am working in
understanding them (I am sorry, when we love what we do, we talk with love about it).
I guess I am
going to stop here, let me leave more ideas for coming posts.
Keep in
touch,
ESR14-PLP.
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