In order to satisfy the rising energy demands of global consumption, a new cleaner and renewable power source needs to be explored, conceptualized and developed. This paper intends to introduce an alternative source of energy by using piezoelectric material -a class of smart material. A piezoelectric road that will produce electricity from the stress experienced by the roads due to the movement...

Iran’s security is affected by a broad region that includes the Caspian Basin, Central Asia, Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf states, Pakistan, Turkey, and the Middle East. However, an increased focus on the countries of the Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO), as well as Iraq, on the one hand, and with members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) (including Yemen) on the other, provides a na...

We present a one dimensional model for the development of cor-rugations in roads subjected to compressive forces from a flux of cars. The cars are modeled as damped harmonic oscillators translating with constant horizontal velocity across the surface, and the road surface is subject to diffusive relaxation. We derive dimensionless coupled equations of motion for the positions of the cars and th...

In this paper, we propose an automatic method for generating roads based on a weighted anisotropic shortest path algorithm. Given an input scene, we automatically create a path connecting an initial and a final point. The trajectory of the road minimizes a cost function that takes into account the different parameters of the scene including the slope of the terrain, natural obstacles such as ri...

Roads are a potential threat to bat conservation. In addition to the direct risk of collision of bats with vehicles, roads could pose a threat to bat populations as a result of habitat loss, degradation and fragmentation, and could act as barriers to movements of bats between habitats.We performed a systematic review of the literature and conducted meta-analyses to assess the threat posed by ro...

Roads may be one of the most common disturbances in otherwise continuous forested habitat in the southern Appalachian Mountains. Despite their obvious presence on the landscape, there is limited data on the ecological effects along a road edge or the size of the "road-effect zone." We sampled salamanders at current and abandoned road sites within the Nantahala National Forest, North Carolina (U...