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South Bend startup looks to improve winter road treatment with sensors at intersections

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February 2, 2019

SOUTH BEND — At the corner of Eddy and Cedar streets, during a lull in the dismal weather last week, 23-year-old Bradley Tener pointed up at a small white contraption strapped to the overhanging traffic signal pole.

“That’s our newest model,” Tener said, explaining the capabilities of the infrared camera that can measure road temperature, air temperature, dew point and humidity.

Originally from the Lake Tahoe area at the northern California- Nevada border, where snow is often measured in feet rather than inches, Tener knows severe winter weather well.

And using a series of infrared cameras at intersections throughout South Bend, he’s hoping to collect data that will help save the city money on de-icing and save lives by improving road treatment during the winter months.

It was during his time as an engineering undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame that Tener realized how much of an impact sensors can have on road treatment and de-icing during the winter.

“The big thing with road temperatures is that if road temps drop, your salt starts to become less effective,” Tener said. “But cities really don’t have a handle on road temperatures because units are way too expensive.”

Tener said current prices for a Road Weather Information System, or RWIS, can exceed $20,000 per unit, and in a city the size of South Bend, he estimated that the ideal number of sensors would be around 30.

The infrared cameras are focused on a roughly one-foot circle of pavement immediately below traffic signals, and send information on the street’s temperature to applications that city employees and Tener can view on computers and smartphones.

Those high prices have prevented small and mid-sized cities from incorporating road temperature measurement into their winter treatment processes.

“The only time you see units that measure road temperature are on highways and at airports,” Tener said. “And so cities have always been a little bit in the blind on that aspect.”

But the recent Notre Dame graduate’s startup, Frost Control Systems, hopes to change that with sensors that are thousands of dollars cheaper. Beginning in 2017, Tener installed six sensors in South Bend at no cost to the city, in a trial to gauge their effectiveness.

At first, Tener assembled the housings for the infrared camera sensors in his basement.

Last month, Tener’s startup received $20,000 from the entrepreneurship nonprofit Elevate Ventures, as part of its “High Potential Startup” grant program, and Tener is it the midst of a $250,000 round of fundraising from local investors.

Frost Control Systems has trials ongoing not just in South Bend but also in Lincoln, Neb., Battle Creek, Mich., and Wyoming, Mich., with plans to expand to Grand Rapids and add more sensors to existing cities in the future.

Public Works Director Eric Horvath said the new sensors have made a difference for road crews, helping during the late fall to determine when roads needed brine or when the ground temperature was warm enough to melt off snowfall, and aiding in pre-application for colder temperatures when city street crews apply differing combinations of brine and BEET HEET, a beet-based de-icing product.

“Our street crews are looking at the temperature of the roads, and that’s how they make decisions on what the mix is going to be when we’d send out,” Horvath said.

In temperatures above 30 degrees, city crews typically apply a brine solution. But the lower the temperature, the higher percentage of BEET HEET is mixed with the brine, to combat refreezing.

Before Tener installed the sensors, street crews relied on air temperature readings to determine pre-treatment and post-freeze de-icing, Horvath said. But often the road temperature can vary significantly from the air temperatures, depending on sunshine, temperature in previous days and precipitation.

During the extreme cold on Wednesday and Thursday, data from the sensors showed that the road temperature was significantly warmer than the air temperature.

At 8 a.m. Wednesday, when the air temperature was minus 16 degrees Fahrenheit, the road temperature was minus 7 degrees. By noon, sunshine caused the road temperature to increase to 14 degrees, while the air temperature was still minus 12 degrees.

Now, the network of sensors allows the city to “get a better impact of how those treatments impact the roads and how we can better apply based on that.”

“It’s not merely about saving staff and salt costs,” Horvath said, “it’s also about saving lives and reducing accidents.”

As far as future plans, Tener said he hopes to see full systems implemented in multiple cities, providing increased data points and insights for municipal street crews. The city plans to continue evaluations of the sensor system, but hasn’t made specific determinations on if additional sensors are needed yet.

As far as his company’s future, Tener plans to keep it located here.

“We’re based out of South Bend,” Tener said, “and we plan to stay here.”

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