A Montana State University ice researcher recently won a $1.5 million grant from the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center to help a multi-institution team develop technologies to enable more readily sustained military operations in cold regions, such as within the Arctic Circle.
The project is funded by a program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which develops emerging technologies for military use and which, last year, announced a program called Ice Control for Cold Environments. According to MSU’s Kevin Hammonds, associate professor of civil engineering in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering, the goal of the overall project is to look to nature for potential solutions to problems such as troops getting frostbite or ice buildup on military vehicles and equipment, among other challenges associated with working in sustained temperatures of minus 40 degrees Celsius or colder.
“The project is focused on identifying natural biomolecules from organisms that thrive in the Arctic,” Hammonds said. “There are flora and fauna such as fungi and mosses, fish and even polar bears for instance, that have the ability to inhibit or enhance the formation of ice.”
Biomolecules are molecules made of organic matter. The primary goal of the project, Hammonds said, is to build a database of biomolecules and their ice-controlling properties to identify the best candidates for further development and potential deployment.
Hammonds, who is part of MSU’s Sub-Zero Research Lab, said his team will use several techniques to screen the biomolecules and related compounds. One of them, Raman spectroscopy, uses light to find molecular fingerprints that can identify chemical compositions and molecular structures. Another, thermal hysteresis, examines the differences in temperature-dependent properties of a material when it is heated and cooled. Hammonds also anticipates developing a new technique that would utilize a form of photography called hyperspectral imaging. The advanced imaging technique captures and analyzes a wide spectrum of light across multiple contiguous wavelengths to identify materials based on their spectral signatures.
“We’re going to try and put the hyperspectral imager on a microscope and look at these tiny droplets that we’re freezing,” Hammonds said. “We may still be able to use that sort of spectral approach to be able to identify where the molecule might be within the ice or anything else we can learn about its properties.”
Controlling the properties of ice could have many applications, Hammonds said.
“It’s minus 40 degrees out, and you’re trying to get troops moved around and do training exercises. It’s pretty brutal on everyone,” he said. “Imagine if we were to come up with a cream that people can put on their fingers to prevent frostbite, or a thin film that can keep ice from forming on aircraft and other equipment.”
By using organic molecules and related compounds, the potential ice-controlling matter would likely be nontoxic, according to Hammonds.
“It’s really important that we’re using something that’s derived from nature so it’s not something that’s synthetic or something that’s going to be a forever chemical and basically pollute the environment in the Arctic or elsewhere,” he said.
Hammonds said the potential ice-controlling biomolecules will be provided by team members from other organizations, including the Army ERDC’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, Michigan Tech, the University of Florida and the University of Michigan.
“DARPA wants to be able to address every single problem that the cold can possibly cause,” he said, referring to military personnel and equipment. “Suppose that the path that they need to drive their vehicles down in the Arctic has gotten slushy and soft and the vehicles aren’t traveling too well. Perhaps we can develop a solution that freezes the path so they can drive over it.”
Hammonds admits that the challenge of controlling when water crystallizes could sound farfetched.
“At first it sounds like science fiction,” he said. “But there’s a real opportunity here to learn a lot about ice and cold environments, and MSU and our Subzero lab are uniquely positioned to do this work.”
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