LiquiGlide locked lubricant into surface texture so ketchup stops sticking

Kripa Varanasi, an MIT mechanical engineering professor who returned to academia in 2009 after nearly five years at GE, had been hunting inefficiencies at interfaces - ice on wings, steam condensers, methane hydrates clogging pipelines. In 2012 he and doctoral student David Smith launched LiquiGlide to commercialize the slippery-surface discovery from Smith's thesis, but their first application ideas weren't cutting it - until Varanasi's wife, fighting a honey jar at snack time, said: 'You work on slippery things. Why can't you make a slippery bottle?'

The physics: a normal coating of oil gets wiped away as product flows past, like oil on a griddle needing replenishment with every pancake. Varanasi and Smith realized that a sufficiently fine microscale or nanoscale texture could harness capillary forces - the same ones that lift water up a tree's passages - to anchor a lubricant permanently in place. After experiments across textures and lubricants, they found combinations where the oil stays put and the product slides on it.

Five years on, the company had raised more than $24 million across two venture rounds and signed contracts with more than 70 companies to bring versions of the coating - some food-grade - into ketchup and glue bottles, cosmetics jars, paint cans and agrochemical mixing vats. The demo video of ketchup sliding effortlessly out of its bottle passed two-thirds of a million views on YouTube.

Score a surface with micro/nano texture and capillary forces hold the lubricating oil in place - the oil in the pan never leaves, so nothing sticks.

Superhydrophobic surfaces shed water but fail for viscous, sticky products; the lubricant-impregnated texture works on any fluid because the product slides on oil, not on solid.

Capillary forces hold the lubricant in place, so unlike a wiped-on coating it never depletes - solving the pancake-griddle problem by keeping the oil in the pan.

The lab had systematically catalogued interfaces that waste energy across industries, so when a consumer application appeared, there was deep science and a patent path already behind it.

When stickiness wastes product and energy, don't reformulate the fluid - texture the surface: a lubricant pinned by capillarity turns any container or pipe permanently slippery.

By April 2017 LiquiGlide had contracts with more than 70 companies and had closed a second venture round toward $24M total. Varanasi also founded a second company working with large industrial partners on carbon-emissions reduction. Versions of the coating were headed to market across food, adhesives, cosmetics and paints.