Spray-On 'Ice-Shedding' Coating Could Protect Cargo Ships, Airplanes, and Power Lines

Coatings developed at the University of Michigan  could help researchers obtain the longtime goal of ice-proofing very large structures like cargo ships, airplanes, and power lines. The spray-on coatings cause ice to fall away from large areas with just the force of a light breeze. Previous ice-repellent coatings have worked well on small areas, but less effectively on very large surfaces. The key to the U-Mich engineers' new coating is its usage of low interfacial toughness (LIT). The concept of interfacial toughness is well known in the field of fracture mechanics, where it underpins products like adhesive-based aircraft joints. Until now, it hadn’t been applied to ice mitigation.

Transcript

00:00:04 >> This particular experiment is aimed at designing new types of materials that easily shed ice from very, very large areas. So typically ice sticks really well to most structures including roofs and power lines and wind turbines. What we've developed here is a new approach that focuses on low interfacial toughness or essentially allowing cracks to propagate at the interface between ice and any underlying structure. And so what we expect to see is, in the two surfaces that we're comparing, in the uncoated surface the ice will remain stuck to the underlying substrate, whereas on the coated one it should fall off under its own weight. I think this is sort of a big change in the design of materials and

00:00:51 something that's never been looked at. Very excited to see what we've done so far but also to see what's going to come in the future.