Glass Defrost by using NovoGenio TPU Film NovoGlass®SF with an Embebed Metallic Web

The frosting effect is a physical phenomena that we see every day at home, when we open our refrigerators, and all winter seasons outside our homes covering the glasses of our vehicles, and whitening our gardens and landscape.

Frost is formed when the temperature of a solid surface in the open cools to below the freezing point of water. Then the ambient water (the humidity), in contact with this surface condensates and frozen on top of it. The water gets accumulated on the surface in the form of ice crystals and might generate different type of problems depending on where it gets accumulated.

At NovoGenio labs, we have been working to provide some solutions to get rid of the ice, by defrosting glasses and recovering the vision and consequently the security when piloting, sailing or driving. We have developed special optical TPU Films with a resistive wiring on them, working in collaboration with another European partner company. Our solution is based on warming up the glass surface, making use of the Joule effect, to melt the crystallized water. We have tested our solution without affecting any optical, mechanical and functional properties of our Film when it is laminated and works as a defrosting device. Our defrosting laminated structure has shown to be reliable and robust after been submitted to an extreme Temperature test at 60ºC during 12 hrs.

As you know, the frozen water can be a big winter issue if we are not prepared to avoid it. It can become a serious problem in agriculture, aeronautics, and ground transportation. In that sense, let us recall you briefly some different situations in which the freeze humidity can be a huge problem:

• In agriculture for example: The plants might suffer damage when the temperature falls low enough to freeze the water in the cells that make up the plant tissue. The tissue damage resulting from this process is known as "frost damage" affecting crops.

• In house appliances performance, like refrigerators: The surface  accumulate ice inhibits heat transfer out of the cabinet increasing running costs. Furthermore, as the ice builds up it takes increasing space from within the cabinet, reducing the space available for food storage.

• In mechanical structures, like wings of planes or blades of wind turbines: The accumulation of ice causes an increase of weight of these structures making them inoperative. Moreover some undesirable structural tensions and colateral corrosion effects might take place.

• In planes, cars and boat windshields or building glasses where vision is very important: The ice accumulation affect the visibility through the glasses being a serious problem in the case of vehicles in motion affecting the security of the people inside them.

If you are interested to know about our solution defrosting glasses, feel free to download our Presentation. You will find on it some data from the tests we performed on optical laminated structures. These results might be useful to be considered in the construction of front shields for planes, cars, trains and boats. In this seven pages report, you will find technical information about our defrosting solution summarized in five functional tests:

1. - Defrosting functionality test
2. - Temperature/Voltage test performance
3. - Temperature/ Heating speed test
4. - Defrosting time test
5. - Max Temperature/Time test

Hopefully you find it interesting.

Download the file

After reading it, if you have any question or comment please don't hesitate to contact us to share your comments and/or doubts.