PhD student wins Best Poster Award at ASME conference for ice adhesion research
Rhodamine B dye being completely rejected from a droplet of water by slowly decreasing the surface temperature to just below freezing. This caused a very slow unidirectional ice front to form and push out the solute.
PhD student Chris Carducci recently received the Best Poster Award for a poster titled “Adhesion of Impure Ice on Surfaces” during the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME) International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE) 2024 in Portland.
IMECE is ASME’s largest research and development conference focused on mechanical engineering while encompassing perspectives from many engineering disciplines. Approximately 2,400 papers, presentations, and posters are presented at the conference each year. Attendees include the leading researchers in their representative disciplines from academia, government, and industry R&D labs.
Carducci’s research focuses on understanding how impurities affect ice adhesion to different surfaces and how they can make ice less sticky to surfaces such as roads and planes.
“We performed a large battery of tests to see how strong different weight percentages of salt, surfactants, and solvents adhere to surfaces like glass, silicone, and copper,” said Carducci, who works under the direction of Associate Professor Sushant Anand in the Anand Research Group at UIC.
“The answer lies in how fast the ice freezes. Ice would much rather remain pure and thus rejects contaminants when it can. However, this can only happen if the contaminants have time to ’escape’ the freezing ice front,” he added.
During one experiment, Carducci slowly froze a dyed water droplet. He then observed the dye being rejected from the ice and pushed out of the droplet, leaving pure ice.
“This is our preliminary explanation to how very impure ice can stick so strongly to surfaces in some environments that would otherwise disagree with our experimental results,” he said.
He noted that the research can have a significant impact on the world as it advances the understanding of how to better engineer surfaces that shed ice much more efficiently and economically.
“By understanding the physics of how contaminants are rejected from ice and by controlling the freezing front speed, we can help revolutionize industries that rely on separations of solutes from desalination, polluted water treatment, and more,” he said.
In addition to conducting research, Carducci finds working with undergrads in the lab to be “highly rewarding” as they make innovations and solve highly complex problems.
“I’m amazed at the initiative, creativity, and diversity of ideas our undergrads have when given a novel problem. Being a part of their growth as academics and researchers and eventually being able to see them walk across the stage at graduation is a huge honor for me,” he said.