No More Frost: Scientists Unveil Long-Lasting Anti-Freeze Technology
The optimized surface completely prevents frost formation on flat areas for up to one week.
One day, we might finally say goodbye to defrosting freezers or scraping frost off slippery surfaces. Engineers at Northwestern University have developed a new strategy to prevent frost formation before it even starts.
In a new study, the researchers discovered that tweaking the texture of any surface and adding a thin layer of graphene oxide prevents 100% frost from forming on surfaces for one week or potentially even longer. This is 1,000 times longer than current, state-of-the-art anti-frosting surfaces.
As an added bonus, the new scalable surface design also is resistant to cracks, scratches, and contamination.
By incorporating the textured surface into infrastructure, the researchers imagine companies and government agencies could save billions of dollars per year in averted maintenance costs and energy inefficiencies.
The research was recently published in the journal Science Advances.
Unwanted frost accumulation is a major concern across industrial, residential, and government sectors,” said Northwestern’s Kyoo-Chul Kenneth Park, who led the study. “For example, the 2021 power crisis in Texas cost $195 billion in damages, resulting directly from frost, ice, and extreme cold conditions for more than 160 hours. Thus, it is critical to develop anti-frosting techniques, which are robust for long periods of time in extreme environmental conditions. It is also necessary to develop anti-frosting methods which are easy to fabricate and implement. We designed our hybrid anti-frosting technique with all of these needs in mind. It can prevent frosting for potentially weeks at a time and is scalable, durable, and easily fabricated through 3D printing.”
Park is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and a faculty affiliate of the Paula M. Trienens Institute for Sustainability and Energy and the International Institute for Nanotechnology.
Article
This could save a lot of money and energy during cold climates. It feels like soon science will have a solution for all problems, the only thing is if I'll live long enough to see all that