Icy Cold Technology

Bleeding Edge

from the oh,-now-they-tell-us? dept

So, now that winter is ending we finally find out that there are some researchers at Dartmouth are working on ways to use technology to better deal with ice. The first, and perhaps most obvious, use of the technology is to build it into automobile windshields. In the demo unit discussed in the article, the flip of a switch makes a large chunk of ice simply pop-off a piece of glass. Other uses, however, are more creative, including building it in to skis and snowboards to act as a form of anti-lock braking. It would melt and refreeze the snow and ice under the surface at a rapid clip giving the skis or snowboards more traction. They think they can build it into skis for an extra $100 per pair. Still, it sounds like this ice technology still hasn’t found enough commercial backers yet. Two companies, creatively named Ice Engineering and Ice Surface Development, both seem to be having trouble finding backers to help commercialize the technology.