Subscription Center
New de-icing technique promises to zap ice off of cars, airplanes and bridges in seconds
February 6, 2009 | 6
Because ice is a proton semiconductor, unlike the electron semiconductors found in computers and other electronic devices, in principle you can make any electronic device run on ice, says Victor Petrenko, professor of engineering at Dartmouth College's Thayer School of Engineering and a former research lab director at the Russian Academy of Science's Institute of Solid State Physics....[More]
One of Ice Engineering's biggest installations is the Uddevalla cable bridge in Sweden, where the technology has been in place since 2005.
[Link to this slide]
The 5,617-foot- (1712-meter-) long Uddevalla bridge traverses the Sunninge Sound in western Sweden and features 489-foot- (149-meter-) tall pylons.
[Link to this slide]
The Uddevalla bridge is held together by 120 cables, each more than 655 feet (200 meters) long and 10 inches (25.4 centimeters) in diameter.
[Link to this slide]
Each steel cable is covered by a thin polymer tube to prevent rusting, which is in turn covered with stainless steel foil. "We apply [an] electric pulse to either end of the cable for about one second," Petrenko says, "and all ice attached to it falls down."...[More]
The Atrium in Moscow city (completed in December) includes a 107,639-square-foot (10,000-square-meter) glass dome roof.
[Link to this slide]
Ice Engineering company designed a thin oxide film to create an electrically conductive and transparent surface that could be used to cover the Moscow City mall's glass dome.
[Link to this slide]
Electric transmission lines in Quebec buckle under thick ice coats, creating regional power outages.
[Link to this slide]
Ice Engineering is also getting into the power line de-icing market with its variable-resistance cable technology, which Petrenko says will enable power utilities to swiftly remove ice from lines without need to shut down the lines and interrupt service....[More]
Petrenko in 2001 spun his research at Dartmouth off into a separate company (Ice Engineering, LLC) so he could focus on developing new ice-busting technologies.
[Link to this slide]
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
50 Years Ago: Nerve Cells Talking
Shifty Science: Programmable Matter Takes Shape with Self-Folding Origami Sheets
Origami Sheets That Fold Themselves
Holographic Film for 3-D, Sans Those Silly Specs
Engineering Silicon Solar Cells to Make Photovoltaic Power Affordable
The Next 20 Years of Microchips: Pushing Performance Boundaries
How do mirrors reflect photons?
Claude E. Shannon: Founder of Information Theory
YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
6 Comments
Add CommentThis article reads like an advertisement. Furthermore, I guess there are a few mistakes in this representation:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. It looks to me as if power per square meter is a better unit than power per meter for deicing a surface.
2. Assuming a window of "1 meter long", 700 W for a 12V car battery would amount to 58 Amps. I know this circuit takes a lot of power, but I not remember seeing a 60 Amp fuse for the defroster in my car.
3. 20,000 kW = 20 MW. Such power for 4 seconds releases 80 MJ of energy, which is about 30 times the total amount of electrical energy stored in my 60Ah 12V car battery. Also, this would be sufficient energy to melt 250 kg of ice at the freezing point.... I guess this should have read either 20 kW or 20,000 W.
you are such a deliberate reader!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would love to see this idea applied to sidewalks. Several years ago I built an ice melter using halogen lamps. It softens the ice and makes it easy to chop it away from the concrete, but is quite slow.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this20 THOUSAND kilowatts per meter?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPart of the innovation, if I read this fuzzy article correctly, is that the ice is melted from underneath, where it is touching the thing it is coating, so the ice then falls off. That way you don't have to melt the entire mass of ice.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut to apply that approach to concrete sidewalks, you would have to warm the concrete, which is massive and has huge heat capacity, and isn't insulated from the soil. So warming that mass of concrete and soil would take friggin' forever. I suppose you could coat the concrete with a thin sheet of stainless steel, like those cables in the story. But that wouldn't work for any number of reasons.
Great Post!Fantastic View!Actually,Our snow and ice management team has decades of experience in managing Kansas City's unique weather patterns and storm systems. We work 24/7 to <a href="http://www.snowmenkc.com">Snow Removal Kansas City remove ice and snow </a> from your property and we do not stop until the work is done.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this