The Secret to Penguins' Anti-Icing Abilities: How They Stay Frost Free in the Cold

Antarctic penguins live in the bitter cold, but they somehow manage to avoid getting iced up after dropping into and out of the water. Now, scientists may have figured out the secrets for this anti-icing ability.

The researchers first became interested in penguin feathers while watching a nature documentary about the birds. That's when one of them noticed that the penguins jumped in and out of very cold water, sat in very cold temperatures, and had no ice forming on their feathers.

Intrigued, the researchers took a closer look at penguins, confirming with penguin experts that no one had ever observed ice on the feather coat of healthy penguins.

So why was this the case? The researchers found that the feathers have tiny pores that trap air and make the surface hydrophobic. In addition, the penguins apply an oil, which is produced by a gland near the base of their tail, to their feathers. The combination of the tiny holes and the oil makes the feathers superhydrophobic.

On superhydrophobic surfaces, water droplets bead up and sit on the surface-almost like spheres. It could be this sphere-like geometry that delays ice formation, since heat has a hard time flowing out of the water droplet if the droplet does not make much contact with the surface.

"Heat flow could be compared to traffic," said Pirouz Kavehpour, one of the researchers, in a news release. "If you have a freeway that turns into a tiny, two-lane road, the traffic will back up. Similarly, heat does not flow well from the large cross-section of the middle of the drop to the small cross-section where the drop makes contact with the feather."

What's interesting is that this anti-icing solution could help humans solve some of their own problems with ice. For example, ice on an airplane's wings, flaps and rudder can alter the aerodynamic properties of the plane and even cause it to crash. By better understanding anti-icing properties, researchers could incorporate these properties into materials for planes.

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