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Silicon is not necessarily tough in the sense of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toughness -- it really depends.

The hard problem in road surfaces is not the sitting outside for 20 years. Glass, even cheap crappy glass, handles this last just fine; see windows in houses. The hard problems are dealing with repeated time-varying mechanical stress and dealing with thermal expansion (windows can play fast and loose with this by leaving expansion space around the glass inside the frame).



Crystal silicon not steel, but it's reasonably close to concrete. And concrete is the high end road surface vs. asphalt.

Crystal silicon [.6 - 1.3KIc (MPa · m1/2)] https://lirias.kuleuven.be/bitstream/123456789/355152/1/Ther... (Page 12)

Concrete [0.2-1.4 KIc (MPa · m1/2)] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fracture_toughness




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