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The method isn’t perfected yet, but the latest results are incredibly promising
AFTER decades of fussing about with HVAC systems and chemicals, a new way to defrost your car in the mornings is being developed.
The new method promises to not only save United States drivers time on their winter morning routine, but also energy by leveraging ice’s own physics against itself.
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Researchers at Virginia Tech have found a new means of defrosting vehicles by leveraging the small amount of voltage that naturally exists within frost.
This would eliminate the need for toxic commercial chemicals which can damage the environment, as well as wasting gas and unnecessarily creating emissions to use a car’s defroster in the morning.
Called “electrostatic defrosting,” the new approach was developed by Jonathan Boreyko, an associate professor in mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, and his team.
The method focuses on the fact that water molecules don’t always arrange into the tidiest of ice lattices, with some having impurities such as one extra or lacking one hydrogen molecule.
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These imperfections result in ionic defects, or places in frost where there is too much negative or positive charge.
Boreyko’s team hypothesized that applying positive voltage to an electrode plate held above the frost would attract the negatively charged ionic defects to the top of the sheet, while positively charged defects would be repelled towards the frost’s base.
This would polarize the frost significantly, hopefully exhibiting a strong attractive force to the electrode. If this force were strong enough, frost crystals could jump onto the electrode off of the frost sheet itself, effectively defrosting a windshield.
With no applied voltage, the copper electrode plate was able to remove 15% of the frost thanks to its aforementioned small amount of inherent voltage.
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Applying voltage increased the results significantly, resulting in 40% of frost being removed at 120 volts and 50% at 550 volts. While it was theorized increased voltage would consistently result in more frost removed, this didn’t end up being the case.
“Keep turning up the voltage and more frost will jump away, right? What was unexpected was when the opposite happened,” said Boreyko to the Virginia Tech news site.
They discovered that charge leakage from the polarized frost into the underlying substrate it grew on was occurring, especially at high voltages.
After switching to an air-trapping superhydrophobic substrate to grow the frost on, Boreyko and co’s theory was confirmed, with up to 75% of the frost being removed at higher voltages.
“When using the superhydrophobic surface, the electrostatic defrosting was powerful enough to make a hidden Virginia Tech ‘VT’ logo become clearly visible on the surface after the frost jumped off,” said the project’s lead researcher Venkata Yashasvi Lolla.
Research is continuing with the goal of eventually reaching 100% ice removal, which would allow for a non-toxic and low-energy method of defrosting cars relative to current methods.
The American Automobile Association shared advice on preparing your car for the winter months.
AAA gave the following tips for drivers getting ready for cold weather:
“We hope that in the near future, EDF will prove to be a cost-effective, chemical-free, and low-energy approach to deicing,” concluded Boreyko.
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