A group of researchers has devised a method of sliding ice and frost off surfaces by melting the interfacial layer directly.

A group of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Kyushu University has developed a way to remove ice and frost from surfaces extremely efficiently, using less than 1% of the energy and less than 0.01% of the time needed for traditional defrosting methods.

The group describes the method in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing. Instead of conventional defrosting, which melts all the ice or frost from the top layer down, the researchers established a technique that melts the ice where the surface and the ice meet, so the ice can simply slide off.