A Surface Slicker Than Ice

Hockey isn’t just for the frigid parts of the world anymore. Thanks to the development of high quality synthetic ice in the past few years, Mexico, The United Arab Emirates, Korea, and many other countries that don’t freeze over in a normal year have rinks where figure skaters can practice their Camel spins, hockey players can pass the puck, and families can fall down together, all in the balmiest of weather.  

With this in mind, residents of northern climes can now happily practice their beloved ice-dependent sports all year round, since all that skating over polymers has been almost as good as skating over frozen water. However, that was “almost as good” as a sticking point for many.
 

Engineering the feel of real ice

In fact, we reported on the faux-ice phenomenon back in 2018. The Glice rink for sale at that time was “closer to the real thing,” as the headline puts it—with low enough friction to please skaters who wanted to skate when it was warm and rink owners who didn’t want the cost and hassle of keeping ice frozen and didn’t mind the tradeoff of the additional friction.  

Now Glice has gone a step further toward that darling concept of theoretical physics, frictionlessness. The company’s newest surface has less friction than bona fide, freshly Zambonied, actual ice.  

To get his product to that state, Glice CEO and co-founder Viktor Meier did something new. Previously, every iterative improvement came from trial and error. But this time he hired a tribologist. Upon joining the team, the friction expert estimated it would take roughly 10 years before they came close to beating ice at its own game, whereas Meier pushed for endless experimentation.  

“He was more conservative and I was more the crazy entrepreneur,” Meier said. 

The back and forth worked well, because it was only a matter of years before they came up with the most recent incarnation that is a just-right recipe of polymers that balances hardness, lubrication, and skate indentation.

Real ice is hard stuff, which in and of itself reduces friction. When a skate pushes over it, it creates a thin film of water that increases the slipperiness. To perform any kind of skating maneuver, such as turning, the ice gives the skate something to dig into and push against.

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To imitate this set of phenomena as best as possible, Meier and his team turned to the shear effect. At the nano level, layers of polymer molecules slide over each other as the skate slides forward.  

“It’s like a deck of cards that you slide sidewise, and each card multiplies the glide of the next one,” Meier explained. “We were able to create that on the surface using nano compounds used in space technology.” 

To give their material the grip that ice has, they had to sacrifice a certain amount of slipperiness and let a skate have a small amount of indentation as it slides across the Glice.  

“For forward movement, it’s absolutely no problem if you have less indentation. The problem is grip—you want the skates to have grip so they can push off,” Meier said. “So, we needed to find the perfect point of maximum reduction of indentation, but still having grip.” 

Miraculously, those indentations don’t stick around. The scratches are microscopically shallow and users report that this latest version actually gets better with use—although it’s not yet clear why. Perhaps additional skating pushes the tiny “hills” created by skates back into the grooves they previously made. 

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In fact, there’s still much to understand and improve upon. Though the professionals that have used the newest Glice report that skating on it takes no more effort than skating on the real thing, its frictionlessness has yet to be tested in every condition. 

“In our lab tests, the friction is slightly below real ice. But in the lab, we are only able to test at low speed,” Meier said. “We don’t know how it behaves at really high speed, like if a hockey player sprints.” 

Meier has every intention of “out slipperying” nature’s ice at any speed, and there are already new versions in the works. Glice’s early adopters are hankering to try the latest iteration, but it’s not just obsessive ice skaters looking for a year-long slide.
 

Sliding into the future

Several automotive companies have been using Glice at testing sites to see how their vehicles perform on the worst winter days. The German postal service also uses Glice to train their postal workers on the safest way to walk on ice while carry mail and packages.

Meanwhile, the International Ice Hockey Federation and the International Skating Union are in talks with Glice about adopting it for official games. However, none of these successes are slowing Meier’s drive to improve upon his product.  

“It’s like a journey where suddenly you find the path and you learn how things work. And now, even though we had this huge breakthrough, we can see the future, the path forward, and what we can still improve and test,” he said. “It almost gets addictive.” 

Michael Abrams is a technology writer in Westfield, N.J.