MIT researchers have developed a completely passive, solar-powered way of combating ice buildup. The system is remarkably simple, based on a three-layered material that can be applied or even sprayed onto the surfaces to be treated.
It collects solar radiation, converts it to heat, and spreads that heat around so that the melting is not just confined to the areas exposed directly to the sunlight. And, once applied, it requires no further action or power source. It can even do its de-icing work at night, using artificial lighting.
Icing is a major problem for aircraft, for wind turbines, power lines, offshore oil platforms, and many other places. The conventional ways of getting around it are de-icing sprays or by heating, but those have issues.
The team has achieved with the three-layered material they’ve developed. The top layer is an absorber, which traps incoming sunlight and converts it to heat. The material the team used is highly efficient, absorbing 95 percent of the incident sunlight, and losing only 3 percent to re-radiation.
In principle, that layer could in itself help to prevent frost formation, but with two limitations: It would only work in the areas directly in sunlight, and much of the heat would be lost back into the substrate material — the airplane wing or powerline, for example — and would not help with the de-icing.
So, to compensate for the localization, the team added a spreader layer — a very thin layer of aluminum, just 400 micrometers thick, which is heated by the absorber layer above it and very efficiently spreads that heat out laterally to cover the entire surface. Finally, the bottom layer is simply foam insulation, to keep any of that heat from being wasted downward and keep it where it’s needed, at the surface.
The three layers, all made of inexpensive commercially available material, are then bonded together, and can be bonded to the surface that needs to be protected. For some applications, the materials could instead be sprayed onto a surface.
The system could find even wider commercial uses, such as panels to prevent icing on roofs of homes, schools, and other buildings.
News Source: http://news.mit.edu/2018/remove-ice-buildup-airplanes-wind-turbines-solar-power-0831
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