Scientists and engineers have been waging a quiet but determined battle against an unlikely problem: the build-up of ice on different structures.
Scientists and engineers have been waging a quiet but determined battle against an unlikely problem: the build-up of ice on different structures.
A thin coating of ice on solar panels can wreak havoc with their ability to generate electricity. Thin layers of ice on the vanes of wind turbines can slow their efficiency.
And a thin layer of ice on an electrical transmission line can be the first step in dangerous ice build up. That’s exactly what happened in Quebec in 1998, when an accumulation of ice on transmission lines and towers crushed more than 150 towers, leaving more than a million people in Quebec and Ontario without power and causing roughly CDN $5 billion in damage.
Now, a research team at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology is working with a novel approach to prevent ice build-up— by cracking it.
Read more at Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Photo: The photograph shows one of the patterned sub-structures that Zhang and his colleagues used in the design of their anti-icing coating. The substructures helped cause macro-cracking at the interface between ice on the surface and the surface itself, a process the researchers called MACI, for macro-crack initiator. (Credit: NTNU Nanomechanical Lab)
