A student team at MIT has developed a spray-on polymer coating that helps power lines shed ice during winter storms, a change that could reduce outages and repair costs as grids carry more electrified heating loads. The project, called MITten, won first place and $10,000 in the 2025 MADMEC materials engineering contest.
The core idea is a superhydrophobic coating that can be sprayed onto aluminum conductors. Nanofillers embedded in the polymer create a textured surface that causes water to bead and roll off before it can freeze. When moisture does not linger on the metal, the chance of ice buildup that can overload and snap lines drops sharply.
To test their concept, the team built an icing chamber that combines simulated rain and sub-zero temperatures. Coated and uncoated aluminum samples were exposed at –10 °C and then examined for ice formation and shedding behavior. The students also bent coated samples and dipped them in liquid nitrogen to check flexibility and performance in more extreme cold.
MITten’s members estimate that coating 1,000 kilometers of line in a region where winter ice is common could save around $1 million in material costs alone, based on outage and repair data. The figure does not include indirect costs such as diesel use for repair fleets or the impact on homes running electric heat pumps during long outages.
MADMEC, run by MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering and backed by Dow and Saint-Gobain, gives teams a modest $1,000 budget and several months to go from concept to prototype. This year’s runner-up teams worked on compostable medical electrodes and microwave-fired ceramics, underlining how far students can push lab-scale ideas under tight constraints.
If superhydrophobic coatings like MITten’s can be scaled and proven on real transmission lines, utilities in cold regions could gain a relatively simple retrofit tool to keep more lines standing through ice storms.
