Di Gao, a chemical and petroleum engineering professor at the university of Pittsburg Swanson School of Engineering, reports a nanoparticle-based coating that thwarts the build up of ice on solid surfaces and that can be easily applied.
His team treated aluminum plates with silicone resin solutions that had been combined with silica nanoparticles (20 nanometres to 20 micrometres in size). As described in Langmuir Letter, DOI: 10.1021 these plates not only were able deflect supercooled water (-20°C) in lab tests, but the team was also able to demonstrate the performance of coatings containing 50 nanometer particles that would not support ice build up in freezing rain where untreated parts of the surface became encrusted in ice.
