The Electrical Vehicle (EV) has become a potential solution for enhancing the sustainability of our road transportation, in view of the environmental impacts traditional vehicles have regarding emissions and use of fossil fuel dependence. However, the widespread use of EVs is still restrained by the energy storage technologies, and the electrification of road transportation is still in its early stages. This paper focuses on the technical aspects related to the ‘electrification of roads’ (called ‘eRoads’) infrastructure that aims to diminish the limitations for using EVs. A historical overview of the technology development towards the electrification of road transportation is presented, along with an overview of prospective technologies for implementing an eRoad charging infrastructure. Of these, the Inductive Power Transfer (IPT) technology is examined in further details. The main objective of this paper is to explore the potential knowledge gaps that need to be filled for a successful integration of IPT technology within actual road infrastructure. As such, this paper can be used as an overview of the current state-of-the-art of eRoad infrastructure and also as guidance towards future research directions in this domain.  

From the current state of literature, the dielectric property of bitumen has not been understood extensively, nor its relation with other properties such as polarity and rheology. In this study, dielectric spectroscopy measurement in a low-frequency range (10⁻²–10⁶ Hz) was performed on both pure bitumen in different grades and wax-modified bitumen (WMB). From the performed tests we found the following: (i) the dielectric response of base bitumen is strongly temperature and frequency dependent, which is also highly linked to the rheology of the system. (ii) No remarkable differences in the dielectric constant (Formula presented.) among different grades of bitumen from the same crude oil source can be seen. (iii) Regular changes of dielectric loss tangent (tan δ) among the different grades of bitumen can be observed, which can be a good indicator for the linkage between the dielectric and rheological responses. In addition, it can also be perceived that the dielectric spectroscopy may have the potential to become a new approach for the multi-scale characterisation of road infrastructure materials.