ENHANCE Poster Earns Honorable Mention at FEniCS 2026 in Paris

Cross a car park barefoot in August and you learn fast how much heat asphalt holds. Under direct summer sun a flexible road surface can climb to nearly 70°C. Most of that heat radiates straight back into the street and makes the city hotter.

Lucía Escudero, from the CRM Knowledge Transfer Unit, brought a different use for it to FEniCS 2026 in Paris. Her poster, “Numerical simulation of asphalt solar collector systems,” laid out the modelling CRM carries out for ENHANCE Europe. The conference’s award committee, chaired by Jérémy Bleyer of the École des Ponts, gave it an Honorable Mention for Best Poster, ranking it among the conference’s strongest and singling out its originality and the engineering behind it.

The idea is to turn ordinary pavement into a surface that harvests energy. You set asphalt solar collectors inside the flexible pavement layers, and they pull out part of the heat the road has soaked up and hand it to a circulating fluid. That fluid carries usable warmth to nearby buildings. Less fossil fuel gets burned to heat them, the cooling load eases in the hottest months, and the street throws less heat back at whoever’s walking on it.

CRM does the maths underneath. It’s a finite-element model built in DOLFINx that couples the transient heat moving through the multilayer pavement with the fluid running through the collector network. The simulation follows how temperature moves through the road, how much heat can actually be drawn out, and how all of it shifts with the materials, the weather, and the exact geometry of the collectors.

FEniCS is the community behind DOLFINx, so Escudero was presenting the work to the people who built the tool she used to do it. The aim now is to get the design right before anything gets paved, and to see how these collectors behave on a real street instead of on paper.