Mabe Design Proposal

The in-refrigerator ice maker has been the same for the past few decades. Ice is usually available when you need it – end of story. Once the storage reservoir is depleted, you may be waiting for another hour and half before a new batch is frozen. This process has remained standard with only incremental improvements through the years. Mabe, the largest Mexican appliance company, challenged us to change this.

First thing’s first, we took a step back to look at the underlying question – what do people use ice for? We found that over 80% of the time, ice is used to cool beverages. Placing ice in a beverage is fine for some people, but many dislike the fact that it dilutes any non-water beverage, or even its annoyance when trying to drink out of an open cup. This led us to our next fundamental question – Why use ice at all? Can we viably bypass it all together?

To escape their ties to ice and dilution, many people choose to leave drinks in their refrigerator prior to drinking to have the temperature start off cold. This can often lead to a cluttered refrigerator and huge headache. What if instead of either of these cooling methods, you could merely pull a warm beverage out of the pantry and have it cooled on demand? The key variable we are dealing with here is heat transfer rate. Place a 12 oz. beverage in the relatively still refrigerator air, and you’ll find that it takes about 2.5 hours to reach a pleasant drinking temperature. However, if you place that same beverage in a bath of ice water, you’ll notice that cooling time is drastically reduced. Shake or rotate within the ice water, and time is decreased even further. This is because you’ve taken advantage of the convective heat transfer coefficient of forced liquid vs. still air, which is about 100 times better.

Taking this idea and running with it, our team was quickly receiving astonished feedback from participant after participant. This is because in an age of technical innovation, people hardly notice seconds or minutes shaved off a routine task. However, slash the time it takes to cool a 12 oz. can from 2.5 hours to less than one minute, and heads will start to turn. Furthermore, to satisfy those instances where a user specifically needs ice, the principals of liquid cooling and internal fluid agitation directly translate to ice making. The cooling fluid just has to be below the freezing temperature of water.

After extensive prototyping and user testing, the team designed and developed the Polar Roller. The Polar Roller is a device that can cool up to nine 12 oz. drinks at a time from room temperature to the “ideal” drinking temperature (43℉ or 6℃) in just over a minute. Additionally, it can freeze one liter of water in just over 10 minutes (compared to 90 minutes in the freezer). This is done using a sub-zero Celsius aqueous propylene glycol solution, coupled with a system of horizontal rollers to spin the containers during the cooling process. Spinning at constant rotation allows a vortex to form, which improves heat transfer while leaving carbonation undisturbed.

Our idea is that this product will be integrated within future refrigerator units. With the rapid cooling capabilities of this device, users will no longer need to keep non-perishable drinks stored in the refrigerator, nor will they need space for ice storage or an automatic ice maker. This will result in significant space savings and allow the refrigerator of the future to increase efficiency while reducing in size.