Jan072009
Melting ice from power lines by increasing resistance
Filed under General by david brooks at 10:46 pm
A company formed by Dartmouth professor Victor Petrenko says its anti-icing technology could be used to cheaply and easily remove ice from power lines. This press release from Dartmouth says, “with only minor cable modifications plus some off-the-shelf electronics, the system switches the electrical resistance of a standard power line from low to high. The high resistance automatically creates heat to melt ice build-up or keep it from forming in the first place.”
The idea of increasing resistance to emit heat certainly makes sense - although it’s kind of funny, since reducing resistance has been the goal of power line technology since Edison and Tesla were crossing swords - but the devil, of course, is in the details. I assume he has already pitched this to PSNH et al.
The Web site for the firm, called Ice Engineering, says its existing IceController system - their not-very-informative graphic is shown above - “manages short pulses of electricity between a power source and the ice interface” to remove ice from the surface of objects, and that it can be made small enough to fit on skis.
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