The Innovative World of Icephobic Coatings

By Cynthia A. Gosselin

Anyone who has had the pleasure of scraping ice off a car windshield, looking nervously at beautiful but deadly ice spears hanging from winter rooftops, or waiting on a slow and interminably long aircraft deicing line at an airport has dreamed of having some sort of coating that would eliminate inconvenient ice and snow accumulation. The desire to triumph over ice and snow accumulation has, in fact, been the focus of significant technical work that has been going on since the 1940s in an attempt to make all kinds of surfaces iceand snowphobic.