The Future of Hot Sauce and Condiment Bottles? MIT's Non-Stick LiquiGlide Coating
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MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith and a team of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at the Varanasi Research Group have been held up in an MIT lab for the last two months addressing a common dining problem...condiments sticking to the inside of a bottle. The result is a genius, non-toxic super-slippery substance called LiquiGlide. Which this miracle material, just about every drop can be extruded from a bottle containing it on the inside.
To demonstrate how revolutionary this is, first take a look at regular ketchup and mayo bottle WITHOUT the LiquiGlide coating.
Ketchup:
Mayonnaise
And now, here are bottles WITH LiquiGlide coating...
Ketchup:
Mayonnaise
Pretty cool, huh?
Originally, Smith's team, which has been working for years now on developing various types of surface coatings, was pursuing different aims. "We were really interested in - and still are - using this coating for anti-icing, or for preventing clogs that form in oil and gas lines, or for non-wetting applications like, say, on windshields," Smith says. "Somehow this sparked the idea of putting it in food bottles. It could be great just for its slippery properties. Plus, most of these other applications have a much longer time to market; we realized we could make this coating for bottles that is pretty much ready. I mean, it is ready." As you can see.
Ironically, if LiquiGlide is a success, it will just mean Smith has to pound even more bottles of ketchup the old-fashioned way. He still has to perform the annoying task in product demos, to show a comparison between the LiquiGlide-sprayed bottles that work and the traditional bottles that don’t. "It was never really a personal pain point for me, but I do hate struggling to get sauce out of the bottles," Smith says, laughing. "I didn’t know about the tapping of the Heinz 57 until I started looking into this. It was all news to me."
But he's already close to experiencing the sweet taste of victory: Last week, LiquiGlide came in second place, out of 215 teams, in MIT’s $100k Entrepreneurship Competition. His team also took home the audience-choice award.
Smith is now in talks with a few bottle companies to market LiquiGlide, though nothing is official yet. It’s still early. The team hasn’t even come up with its own company name, nor been incorporated yet. And their lab is still a complete mess.
"We have all types of sauces, jellies, and jams everywhere in our lab," Smith says. "It’s like a closet full of condiments."
Source: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679878/mits-freaky-non-stick-coating-keeps-ketchup-flowing
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