Poisonous Frogs Inspire Freeze-Resistant Airplanes

It's no secret that ice is bad for flight. Feathers and jet wings alike can grow stiff and heavy from accumulating water that is flash-frozen in the cold of high altitudes and the winter season. That's why airports will delay flights and risk polluting the environment to spray down their planes in antifreeze. Now experts taking a cue from the poison dart frog are proposing a safer and more economic solution.

As described in a study recently published in the journal Advanced Materials Interfaces, Arizona State University researcher Konrad Rykaczewski and his colleagues propose that plane wings should actually secrete antifreeze themselves, much like how dart frogs in Panama sweat out a toxic slime when their safety is threatened.

So what makes that better than the current approach? As things are, flight cancellations and delays due to winter weather are costing airlines a stunning $1.4 billion (USD) in operating expenses and lost work time, according to a 2014 MasFlight report via the Los Angeles Times. Consequentially, passengers wind up paying a net cost of about $970,000 each winter season to accommodate for delays - which usually includes eating out, finding a hotel, and losing work time.

And what's amazing is that the great majority of delays don't have to do so much with an immediate storm, but rather a need to take extra precautions for passenger safety, such as re-spraying wings with a specialized antifreeze mix - a mix that happens to be harmful to the environment on many fronts.

Rykaczewski argues that if the antifreeze was imbued in the wings themselves, released only whenever a water-repellant wing surface isn't enough, airports could easily cut costs and limit how much of the stuff reaches vulnerable ecosystems. (Scroll to read on...)

So how does it work?

"When the surface starts icing over, e.g. due to frost, [designed wing] pores fill up with condensate or ice and make contact with the antifreeze," Rykaczewski explained to CBS News. "Due to the contact, the antifreeze starts melting ice and diffusing. This is quite nice since in a way it is passive - the release of antifreeze happens by itself and does not require any external input from an operator."

In a series of tests, as described in his paper, the researcher found that prototype designs of this system in simulated tests fared quite well, delaying ice accumulation in wings 10 times longer than surfaces just designed to repel water or simply coated in antifreeze.

Still, it's important to note that this tech is far from perfect. Xianming Shi, the director of Washington State University's Laboratory for Advanced & Sustainable Cementitious Materials, warned that this "poison frog skin" approach changes wing surface dramatically, which could unintentionally alter how a plane performs in flight. Accommodations then must be made and problems accounted for before it is even considered as a viable option.

Still, the idea of a plane that can dive headfirst through freezing rain without a care in the world is an attractive one, and can open up options for traveling this incredible planet all the more.

For more great nature science stories and general news, please visit our sister site, Headlines and Global News (HNGN).

- follow Brian on Twitter @BS_ButNoBS