Queen’s University researchers have gained recognition for the discoveries they have made in medicine, engineering, and the sciences; innovations that have improved the lives of people around the world. To make sure that the university and the public continue to benefit from this work, Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) promotes the discoveries of university researchers who have assigned their intellectual property to Queen’s for the purposes of commercialization and whose work is ready for licensing and commercial application. QPI leads the commercialization processes, including the protection of the intellectual property, the creation of strategies to further its development, the search for funders, partners, and licensees, the negotiation of terms, the management of relationships, the collection of licensing and royalty revenues, and their disbursement to inventors.
We will never need to scrape a windshield on a winter’s morning again if Professor Guojun Liu’s Iatest innovation makes it to market.
A Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Materials Science and a professor of chemistry at Queen’s University, Dr. Liu has been working on polymers for most of his academic career, going back more than 30 years. Originally interested in fundamental research, in recent years he has increasingly focused more on applications, specifically on developing what are called hydrophobic coatings – those that, as the name suggests, shed or repel water. During this work Liu has created a family of coatings, which he calls NP-GLIDE coatings, so named because they have no problem gliding down (or shedding) liquids.
For the past five years he has been building on the NP-GLIDE coatings to create one effective at shedding ice.
“It is almost the same as the hydrophobic coating that we developed earlier,” he says, “the greatest difference being the addition of a lubricant. This gives the coating an even lower friction coefficient, which is essential for the spontaneous shedding of ice under the action of its own weight.”
Transparent and mechanically strong in structure (it won’t scratch, scuff, or chip easily) the potential applications for the coating are numerous. The windshield idea mentioned above is just one obvious application, but it could also be used as an anti-ice coating on the blades of wind generators or to coat the face of solar panels to prevent ice build-up. Perhaps the coating could even be applied to the wings of aircraft to prevent the potentially dangerous build-up of ice in winter storm conditions.
“We have several students working on the technology and we are experimenting with different formulations, and we are getting amazing results,” says Dr. Liu.
Dr. Liu has been working with Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) since well before he began developing his ice-shedding coating. In fact, the QPI team helped him secure commercial interest in the previous hydrophobic coating he had developed.
Speaking about Dr. Liu’s current innovation, Jason Hendry, Partnerships Development Officer at QPI, says the cooperation with QPI “started when Dr. Liu was doing more of a theoretical analysis, before anything had actually been developed yet. We said this is interesting, let us know when you have demonstrated proof-of-concept.” Not long after that, in 2019, Dr. Liu was able to show them a working version of the coating. QPI helped him file a U.S. patent application in February 2020. It is currently working its way through the approval process.
Much remains to be done.
“We’re still trying to increase the number of icing and de-icing cycles,” says Dr. Liu. At first they could only go through the process about a dozen times before the coating lost its effectiveness and ice started to build up.
“Now we can get to 30 icing/de-icing cycles before this starts, and even then the build-up is nothing like what would be expected on an untreated surface. We hope we can eventually go to hundreds of icing/de-icing cycles without losing this great property,” says Dr. Liu.
“We have demonstrated really good performance in the lab, and we are eager to conduct testing under actual use conditions.”
Taking his invention to the next stage, will require more funding, says Dr. Liu, and that will require an industry partner, says Jason Hendry; “One who sees the value of the intellectual property and has the wherewithal to move it forward.”
Dr. Liu and Mr. Hendry understand that it is still early days. And that is, says Mr. Hendry, precisely the response they expect from any interested company. That aside, such an expression of interest from industry will open up funding sources and opportunities, such as NSERC’s Idea-to-Innovation program, that could provide Dr. Liu with funds to match what a private sector company puts in. It might also be possible to create a collaborative research project with an industry partner.
Commercialization of new technologies requires finding the right partner. This is the key step that can make or break an innovation.
“We typically do not have multiple companies fighting over a technology, but we have to be selective, to ensure the fit is right,” says Hendry who, given what Liu is working on, is confident that they can find such a party.
Readers interested in licensing or learning more about Dr. Liu’s technology, should visit the Queen's technology information page and contact Jason Hendry at jason.hendry@queensu.ca.