The massive Fatigue Carousel helps keep roads safe

I really hope the scale of this comes across on camera. Drone shots would have been wonderful, but unfortunately the Carousel is just a couple of kilometres away from an airport!

"A fatigue carousel" is a great way of describing a really exhausting week and that's exactly what I'm going to start calling it.

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Two fascinating things I learned from this video:

I actually was just wondering about how civil engineers/scientists know what kind of abuse a road can take and how to measure lifespan of a road. Tom... always answering questions I never thought I'd get an answer to.

Can we take a moment to appreciate how well this guy was able to communicate this in a second language. Amazing.

When I worked for Minnesota Dept. of Transportation, the Research Dept. was proud of establishing a test site on a real piece of freeway with real traffic. This machine gets data a lot faster than that.

One of the mysteries in life - how does Tom Scott find all these niche things that you never knew about - but sort of make sense when you hear about them!

I used to teach English to their colleagues just down the road in Angers where they did pre-studies on the asphalt materials to be used in the Nantes tests. A really interesting subject.

You have a knack for finding the most interesting stuff!

I do wonder, how many wheels does this facility go through during a testing cycle?

As a civil geotechnical engineer, this is fascinating to me. I’d love to get ahold of their data.

At work (agriculture tractor parts supplier) I've seen something very close to this, but instead the test subject is the moving part, not the floor. Tractors ate tied to the center and kept driving in circles through many obstacles as a way of validating its fatigue strength. It is so similar to this that now I'm wondering what else is running in circles out there.

Tom Scott: always pointing out things I didn't know existed but now that I think of them they make perfect sense

I really appreciate the way you can make a 5 minute video that feels like more than a lot of 10+ minute ones

This is very interesting and a current topic for me actually. I work in R&D and QC, and one of the constant conversations is that of aging tests over time. We do real-time tests for some things, which very literally take years; and we are always looking at ways to accelerate this process. But as the gent in the video says, when you accelerate, you are not getting real-world data always. And that can be a very real issue when you are looking at complex chemical reactions over time. A fascinating topic!

I hope Tom remembers to gets his cameras back when the testing finishes in a few months.

I feel like they could have a similar carrousel indoors with cooling coils to simulate freezing conditions, and ice/thaw cycles.

Unfortunately this wont test years of weather erosion, but it is still absolutely fascinating

The fatigue carousel is what I'm calling my internship from now on.