Overview

• Researchers at Virginia Tech published a peer-reviewed study in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces demonstrating that asymmetric herringbone grooves in aluminum channel meltwater to propel ice disks without external force.
• Unexpectedly, applying a hydrophobic coating caused meltwater to form a puddle and trigger a surface-tension imbalance that dislodges and slingshots the ice across the plate.
• The project was conceived in 2019 by Jonathan Boreyko and Saurabh Nath and refined over three years of experiments to reproduce the Racetrack Playa ‘racing’ rocks phenomenon without wind.
• While the lab demonstration confirms the surface-driven propulsion mechanism, proposed applications such as rapid defrosting and magnet-driven energy harvesting remain conceptual and untested outside the laboratory.
• The team notes that roughly two more years of computational modeling are needed to fully characterize the system and assess its potential performance and durability in real-world settings.