A new anti-ice coating, inspired by fish, combines three major ice-fighting jobs into one gel.

Such a coating could help prevent frozen cars, airplane wings, water pipes, and much more.

The same fish proteins have helped scientists preserve specimens at freezing temperatures.

Scientists in California and China have collaborated on an anti-ice coating inspired by Antarctic fish. In February in the northern hemisphere, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to understand how useful this could be—but the more important applications include things like de-icing airplanes and preventing engines from freezing up.

Like something in a TV infomercial, this new material works in three different ways for three times the value: it prevents ice nucleation, which is the way water vapor is triggered into freezing; it lowers the freezing temperature for water that touches it; and it makes the surface more difficult for ice to grab onto.

The team behind the new gel says this three-way action is what sets its new formulation apart. Chemical formulas that do each of the three jobs have tended to be very different, making it too challenging to combine them. "While there are anti-ice solutions out there, they're designed to tackle only one of these three aspects of this complex process, or they only work on certain types of surfaces,” says lead researcher Ximin He of the University of California, Los Angeles.

In their paper , the researchers say their formula is inspired by “biological AFPs” (antifreeze proteins), which are chemicals used by mostly fish to prevent freezing. Frigid seawater may not freeze solid except in special and extreme cases, but fish aren’t made of saltwater—something is preventing them from turning to ice. In humans, freezing tissue forms ice crystals that cause damage both as they freeze and again as they thaw, and this is what frostbite is.

“Fish can inhabit ice-laden or cold seawater below the freezing point of their blood serum by virtue of AFPs,” the NIH explains . “Marine organisms known to possess or express AFPs include bacteria, fungi, crustacean, microalgae, and fish.” Shiitake mushrooms have AFPs, too. From these organisms, scientists derived the proteins and brainstormed ways they could be used.

Preventing ice on airplanes is important and great, but the major use of AFPs before now has been to help preserve scientific specimens at really low temperatures. (Without refrigeration, most biological specimens would go bad pretty quickly.) Specimens can be kept in liquid nitrogen or other freezing-cold conditions without being ice crystallized into destruction. The same factors that make true cryogenic freezing unlikely—the various destructions collectively called “cryo-injury”—make cold preservation difficult without AFPs.

The researchers describe biological AFPs as “multifunctional integrated anti-icing materials” that provided an example of what was possible. They came up with a biological silicone in a medium of mostly water, which can be sprayed in even coats of as little as 50 nanometers thickness onto surfaces.

In most environments, the scientists say, lowering the freezing point and preventing ice nucleation will do the work. “If ice forms inevitably in extremely low-temperature environments, reducing ice adhesion will be considered as the last resort,” they write. What that means is that the water-based medium of the gel itself will encourage any growing ice to just fall off, a mechanism they say was inspired by ice skating.

“The simplicity, mechanical durability, and versatility of these smooth hydrogel surfaces make it a promising option for a wide range of anti-icing applications,” the scientists conclude.

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