Uploaded June 2015 | Updated September 2026, 7 hours ago
A compact and stylish on-demand ice-maker that frees up freezer space used by traditional ice makers. Innovative cooling technology forms cubes from any liquid, or cools your drink directly.
Consumers pay a premium of several hundred pounds for ‘American-style’ fridge-freezers with built-in ice makers, which make ice in trays over several hours and store it for later use. Aside from being expensive, these ice-makers can occupy up to a third of the space in the freezer, can only hold a limited volume of ice, and are not retrofittable to existing freezers. Stand-alone ice-makers work in a similar way, and need to be left out on a counter, so are usually only used in hotels and pubs.
Our on-demand ice-maker is compact, easy to use, and attractive enough to be stored or kept on the counter, like a coffee machine. It can be developed to produce a number of ice cubes from fresh, filtered water, or from your drink in seconds – so melting ice doesn’t dilute it. It can also be configured to cool a drink instantly as it flows through the de ice.
The team looked at a variety of ways to cool water to form ice rapidly, and form it into cubes – a difficult technical challenge. A standard refrigerant cycle is too slow and requires complex (and expensive) components, so instead they exploited the thermoelectric effect, where passing electricity through a junction between two dissimilar metals produces a temperature difference. This allows thin layers of ice to form quickly, but then this ice layer insulates the cooling element, making it hard to form whole cubes. Various ways of making these thin layers into cubes were explored, drawing inspiration from industrial processes such as injection and dip moulding. A key challenge was dissipating the heat removed from the water, achieved by using a closed-loop water cooling system with radiator.
The ‘proof of principle’ prototype on display demonstrates basic functionality but could easily be scaled up for faster production.
Team
Jack Fellows
Martha Geiger
Archie Lodge
Kaimei Zhang
A compact and stylish on-demand ice-maker that frees up freezer space used by traditional ice makers. Innovative cooling technology forms cubes from any liquid, or cools your drink directly.
Consumers pay a premium of several hundred pounds for ‘American-style’ fridge-freezers with built-in ice makers, which make ice in trays over several hours and store it for later use. Aside from being expensive, these ice-makers can occupy up to a third of the space in the freezer, can only hold a limited volume of ice, and are not retrofittable to existing freezers. Stand-alone ice-makers work in a similar way, and need to be left out on a counter, so are usually only used in hotels and pubs.
Our on-demand ice-maker is compact, easy to use, and attractive enough to be stored or kept on the counter, like a coffee machine. It can be developed to produce a number of ice cubes from fresh, filtered water, or from your drink in seconds – so melting ice doesn’t dilute it. It can also be configured to cool a drink instantly as it flows through the de ice.
The team looked at a variety of ways to cool water to form ice rapidly, and form it into cubes – a difficult technical challenge. A standard refrigerant cycle is too slow and requires complex (and expensive) components, so instead they exploited the thermoelectric effect, where passing electricity through a junction between two dissimilar metals produces a temperature difference. This allows thin layers of ice to form quickly, but then this ice layer insulates the cooling element, making it hard to form whole cubes. Various ways of making these thin layers into cubes were explored, drawing inspiration from industrial processes such as injection and dip moulding. A key challenge was dissipating the heat removed from the water, achieved by using a closed-loop water cooling system with radiator.
The ‘proof of principle’ prototype on display demonstrates basic functionality but could easily be scaled up for faster production.
Team
Jack Fellows
Martha Geiger
Archie Lodge
Kaimei Zhang
