Current Defrost Wastes Energy
Current defrost methods flood surfaces with heat and were never optimized to use only the minimal amount of heat to defrost or defog surfaces.
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Developed at the Dartmouth Ice Lab
Our defrost and defog algorithms were developed over decades at the Dartmouth College of Engineering Ice Lab. They researched how ice forms, adheres to surfaces and the best methods to remove ice. The most efficient way to remove ice is to only melt the interfacial layer of ice, about 0.1mm to create a thin film of water so that it can be removed easily. Then, you don’t need to melt the entire mass of ice, which requires a lot of energy. The best way to do this is with pulsed power to a conductive material.
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Control the Penetration Depth of Heat
Our proprietary algorithms control the penetration depth of heat by pulsing the power to the conductive surface. So we only allow the heat to reach the interfacial layer of ice, about 0.1mm from the heating surface. The heat doesn’t propagate or flood beyond this boundary layer so heat isn’t wasted. So this becomes a minimization problem with many inputs.
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Efficient Surface Heating
Because we finely control how heat propagates from a surface to minimize the heat needed to the application, we use much less heat than other methods that are more continuous sources of heat. For Electric Vehicles, we use 20X less energy than HVACs. In refrigeration, we use 10X less energy for defrosting of the evaporator coil.
