Credit: Illinois News Bureau
With winter just a few months away, it is time to start thinking about cold mornings, long shoveling days, and dangerous commutes to work.
One of the more challenging things that people have to deal with in the winter is the ice that inhabits their car windows. But there may be a new technological advancement that can melt that ice away in just one second.
An international team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Japan’s Kyushu University have worked hard to solve our defrosting problem. Their new way of defrosting a window would require less than 1% of the energy and 0.01% of the time needed for standard defrosting techniques. They are also confident that this could be helpful in defrosting airplanes.
The original idea came from refrigeration systems. It was taking up too much energy to defrost a refrigerator. You have to shut down the system, heat up the working fluid, then cool it down again. There had to be a faster and easier way to accomplish these kinds of tasks.
They discovered that it could be done with a pulse of high current. As a result of this, a layer of water is created where the ice and surface meet. A thin coating of conductive film made of indium tin oxide is applied to the area where the pulse needs to hit its target. Once the pulse hits, gravity takes over and the ice simply falls off.
The technology is still in the proof-of-concept stage, but the scientists were recently able to show how they could defrost a piece of glass that was cooled to temperatures as cold as minus 159.8 degrees. Ice was removed easily with one pulse lasting under one second.
