Background

Ice formation and accretion on aircrafts, ships, power lines, oil rigs and automotives is a severe hazard, which not only endangers human life, but also causes enormous financial losses. For example, when ice accumulates on the exposed surfaces of airplanes, it leads to undesirable increase in drag, decrease in lift and reduction in visibility. Furthermore, FAA does not approve airplane take off with ice on the surface – this leads to significant service disruptions and added costs for airlines.

Current market solutions are far from ideal. They suffer from many shortcomings, such as poor durability, environmentally hazardous, or simply poor results. Furthermore, there are virtually no coatings that are truly icephobic (i.e., both anti-icing and de-icing), and most definitely none that are sustainable and biodegradable.

Icephobic coatings are the need of the hour and constitute the next major advance in solving these critical and expensive icing issues.

Technology Overview

NC State researchers have developed a novel icephobic coating that will constitute the next major advance in solving the icing issue of the world. NCSU’s unique coating, named NO-Ice by its inventors, offers two functionalities combined into a single coating: delayed ice formation and easy removal of ice.

The combination of natural materials to fabricate our NO-ice coatings is unique and makes our coatings sustainable and biodegradable, thereby reducing the carbon footprint and giving us a distinct and additional edge over other commercial coatings. The implementation of our NO-Ice coatings significantly reduces the use of anti-freeze liquids, which disrupt marine and aquatic ecosystems. Further, NO-Ice coatings can be applied with inexpensive and scalable dip-coating, brush-coating or spray-coating techniques, thereby requiring minimal capital investment.

This innovation is the product of over 15 years of intensive research in the field of de-icing and anti-icing coatings. Several publications describing the developmental stages are provided below. These publications do not represent the current technology, which further builds upon this body of work.

Further Details

“Superoleophobic surfaces: design criteria and recent studies” - https://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/full/10.1680/si.12.00017
“The design and applications of superomniphobic surfaces” - https://www.nature.com/articles/am201434
Beemer, D. L., Wang, W. & Kota, A. K. “Durable gels with ultra-low adhesion to ice.” J. Mater. Chem. A 4, 18253-18258 (2016 - https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2016/ta/c6ta07262c/unauth

Benefits

Provides both anti-icing and de-icing functionality.
Sustainable, biodegradable, and eco-friendly.
Reduces costs and delays associated with anti-icing and de-icing.

Applications

Airplane de-icing and anti-icing
Oil-pipeline de-icing and anti-icing
Artic ship de-icing and anti-icing

Environmentally Friendly Anti-Icing and De-Icing Coating

Patents

IP Status