At the beginning of 2018, China once again experienced large-scale snowfall, with continuous heavy snowfall and blizzard weather in Shaanxi, Henan, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangsu and other areas, seriously endangering traffic safety and causing serious impacts on people’s production and life. As of 11:00 am on January 5, 2018, the snow disaster has caused 10 deaths and 567000 people affected in five provinces in central and eastern China. In recent years, extreme weather events have occurred frequently and on an increasingly large scale nationwide. It is foreseeable that as global extreme weather phenomena gradually become prominent, such large-scale meteorological disasters will become increasingly frequent.

Statistics show that in non snow disaster years, winter traffic accidents and casualties account for about one-third of the total annual volume, far higher than other time periods. In high-altitude areas such as the Sichuan Basin and the mountainous areas in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, winter non snowy road icing is also a problem that troubles local traffic safety. With the increasingly busy national transportation, winter snow removal and anti freezing have become a major issue that urgently needs to be solved.

At present, the domestic response strategy mainly focuses on snow removal, which consumes a lot of manpower and material resources and lacks timeliness and initiative. Removing snow but not ice, addressing the symptoms but not the root cause, still poses a safety hazard to traffic after snow. For winter snow and ice removal, we urgently need new concepts, new ideas, and new solutions.

Mafilon is a powdered material with a similar gradation to mineral powder, which can fully or partially replace mineral powder in asphalt mixtures. The asphalt pavement mixed with Mafilon can actively melt ice and snow, and can be paved on steep slope sections, tunnel entrances and exits, bridge decks, and mountainous highways that are prone to snow accumulation, effectively preventing snow from icing on the road surface. In addition, active snow melting asphalt pavement should be laid at intersections or sharp turns on urban roads where vehicles need to slow down or make sharp turns, to prevent vehicles from braking and slipping on snowy days.

Mafilon mainly uses porous igneous rock to encapsulate salt, grind it into powder like particles to replace mineral powder in the mixture, and fully disperse salt in the mixture. Through the phenomenon of osmotic pressure and capillary tube, as well as the friction effect of driving vehicles, the salt in Mafilon material gradually precipitates from the narrow space with high concentration inside the asphalt mixture to the road surface with low salt concentration, and quickly dissolves in water, causing the liquid phase vapor pressure of water to decrease, but the solid vapor pressure of ice remains unchanged. In order to achieve the solid-liquid vapor pressure equilibrium of the ice water mixture, ice and snow begin to melt, thereby preventing and delaying the freezing of winter road surfaces, and exerting the effect of snow melting and deicing. At the same time, the volume of porous materials remains unchanged after salt analysis, avoiding the danger of voids caused by the precipitation of effective components in the mixture.