A UBC Okanagan engineer thinks he’s found a game changing solution to icing problems in the winter months.

Assistant Professor Kevin Golovin says his study focused on a new property of ice called ‘interfacial toughness’, which creates a fragile bond with ice.

His study says the material they’ve developed would first be used for automatic ice makers inside freezers.

“It’s a material that ice doesn’t stick to. Whether or not that is applicable to the military or the average Canadian citizen, I think both experience ice on a regular basis, at least in the winter,” he said. “It does have military applications, but not any more so than on the side of a windshield.”

His next steps are working on improving the durability of the material.

“The main sort of impediment from getting a coating onto any sort of application is just how long it’s going to last,” Golovin said on the NL Morning News. “So how durable you can make that material.”

“You can imagine that airplane wings have higher durability requirements than maybe on the side of a power line, so it’s just increasing the durability to match whatever application we want to apply it to.”

Golovin added the material doesn’t prevent ice from forming on surfaces, but it makes it easier for it to be removed in a domino-like effect.

“For anything that’s more than a few centimetres in area, so most things that get iced in our daily lives, this new technology just outperforms sort of traditional anti-icing materials by orders of magnitude,” Golovin added.

“It definitely will sort of revolutionize how we think about how to design these low ice adhesion surfaces.”

Golovin hopes the new material they’ve developed will have real world applications on everything from airplane wings to power lines and car windshields.