Executive Summary

This proposal outlines a fundamentally different approach to highway construction and reconstruction. Instead of successive layers of compacted earth, bound aggregate, and impermeable asphalt or concrete that require periodic excavation, milling, and overlay, the system is conceived as a continuous, interlocking three-dimensional space-truss structure that locks together, drains continuously, generates useful power along its full length, and is placed as an assembled system rather than built in successive wet trades.

Problem Context

Conventional highway reconstruction and resurfacing are costly, slow, and repetitive, commonly running several million dollars per route-mile and measured in years once environmental review, utilities, staging, and traffic management are accounted for. The dominant failure modes — water infiltration, freeze–thaw damage, frost heave, differential settlement, and washouts — are inherent to impermeable or poorly draining layered systems that depend on continuous subgrade support.

System Architecture

Modular geo-blocks built around a rigid, highly porous lattice form the structural core, with processed landfill-derived pulp encapsulated in a rapid-set cementitious or geopolymer matrix. An intermediate porous transition maintains continuous drainage pathways up to a graded crushed-rock base. The surface assembly uses silicon-carbide framing with vulcanized crumb-rubber infill for traction, alongside hermetically sealed, noble-gas-filled perovskite photovoltaic modules that double as drainage channels and pulsed low-energy anti-icing.

Manufacturing and Placement Vision

Centralized, continuous production of lattice elements, geo-blocks, and surface array modules is envisioned at Gigafactory scale, with field placement as high-rate interlocking assembly of prefabricated units rather than sequential excavation, compaction, and curing. The pavement itself is designed to be assembly-dominated rather than wet-trade-dominated.

Principal Challenges

• Full-scale structural performance under repeated heavy truck loading, including fatigue of interlocking interfaces.

• Long-term hermetic integrity of the optical/PV chambers under traffic loading, thermal cycling, and chemical exposure.

• Hydraulic continuity and resistance to clogging of the graded pore network over decades.

• Regulatory pathway: material acceptance, leaching tests, structural design standards, and permitting for a non-standard pavement system.

Closing Note

This is a high-ambition conceptual integration of architected porous lattices, modular interlocking construction, recycled rubber surfaces, rapid-set binders, hermetic perovskite encapsulation, and permeable-pavement hydrology into a single continuous system. The core claim is simple: stop repeatedly repairing a layered system that was never designed to lock, drain, and generate power as one structure, and build the structure that does those things from the outset. It is offered for technical and institutional discussion, not as a ready-to-bid design package.