Durable Ice-Repellent Coating for Planes, Cars, Ships
University of Michigan researchers have created a durable ice-repellent coating that could help keep everything from airplanes to ships, power lines, and windshields ice-free. The new coating is made of common synthetic rubbers like polyurethane. It is more durable and less expensive than earlier ice repellent coatings and ice slides off with only the force of gravity or a light breeze. The researchers believe they have made some of the lowest ice adhesion materials as well as some of the most durable ice-phobic materials that have ever been produced.
Transcript
00:00:00 When it's under your shoe, ice is about the slickest thing there is but when it's on your car windshield it sticks like glue. Ever wonder why that is? Turns out that it's because of something called "interfacial cavitation". It sounds complicated, but it's actually pretty simple and U of M researchers are using it to make a spray-on ice repellent coating that could make scraping your windshield a thing of the past. The new coating is made of common synthetic rubbers like polyurethane. It's more durable and less expensive than earlier ice repellent coatings and ice slides off with only the force of gravity or a light breeze. To our knowledge we have not found any other coating that can survive these kind of challenges. Not only have we think we made some of the lowest ice adhesion materials but we also
00:00:43 think we've made some of the most durable icephobic materials that have ever been produced. The new coding could help keep everything from airplanes to boats, wind turbines, freezers and power lines ice-free that could be a big deal for industries like transportation shipping and energy where ice buildup is an expensive and dangerous problem and like a lot of great ideas it was discovered sort of by accident. Instead of being an evolutionary next step in the field it was like a revolutionary switch in how to make icephobic materials. You can make a silicon rubber as hard or as soft as you want and before this people had only thought it had a single ice adhesion strength. We sort of figured out that based on its physical properties you can get a range of different ice adhesion strength even
00:01:25 for the same material. At this point we have made well over a hundred different coatings with all sorts of different materials. We've been able to develop coatings with ice adhesion strengths as low as point one kilopascals and to our knowledge this is some of the lowest ice adhesion strengths that have ever been reported. The rubbery coatings were great at shedding ice, eventually they figured out that it's because of, that's right, interfacial cavitation. When you take a hard surface and you attach it to a soft surface, the hard surface doesn't want to move much because it's hard. Rubbers, like you think of like a rubber band, can expand a lot and when you have those connected at an interface what happens is what's called an interfacial
00:02:02 cavitation where your rubber wants to to deform your ice doesn't want to deform. That creates a stress concentrator right at that interface and causes the ice to break free. The first applications for the coating should be up and running within a year, probably in frozen food shipping containers where sticking is often a problem. It'll probably take a few years to develop a coating that's tough enough for places like car windshields and airplanes. Once it's perfected, it could be used all over the world to make ice slide off our stuff is easily as it slips under our shoes. The rice plant takes silica out of the ground and it puts it in the husk and it puts it in the stalk to reinforce them to make them stronger. Plants don't pick up heavy
00:02:43 metals so the silica...