Design of anti-icing surfaces: smooth, textured or slippery?

Understanding the complementary roles of surface energy and roughness on natural nonwetting surfaces has led to the development of a number of biomimetic superhydrophobic surfaces, which exhibit apparent contact angles with water greater than 150 degrees and low contact angle hysteresis. However, superoleophobic surfaces-those that display contact angles greater than 150 degrees with organic liquids having appreciably lower surface tensions than that of water-are extremely rare. Calculations suggest that creating such a surface would require a surface energy lower than that of any known material. We show how a third factor, re-entrant surface curvature, in conjunction with chemical composition and roughened texture, can be used to design surfaces that display extreme resistance to wetting from a number of liquids with low surface tension, including alkanes such as decane and octane.

Ice-repellent coatings can have significant impact on global energy savings and improving safety in many infrastructures, transportation, and cooling systems. Recent efforts for developing ice-phobic surfaces have been mostly devoted to utilizing lotus-leaf-inspired superhydrophobic surfaces, yet these surfaces fail in high-humidity conditions due to water condensation and frost formation and even lead to increased ice adhesion due to a large surface area. We report a radically different type of ice-repellent material based on slippery, liquid-infused porous surfaces (SLIPS), where a stable, ultrasmooth, low-hysteresis lubricant overlayer is maintained by infusing a water-immiscible liquid into a nanostructured surface chemically functionalized to have a high affinity to the infiltrated liquid and lock it in place. We develop a direct fabrication method of SLIPS on industrially relevant metals, particularly aluminum, one of the most widely used lightweight structural materials. We demonstrate that SLIPS-coated Al surfaces not only suppress ice/frost accretion by effectively removing condensed moisture but also exhibit at least an order of magnitude lower ice adhesion than state-of-the-art materials. On the basis of a theoretical analysis followed by extensive icing/deicing experiments, we discuss special advantages of SLIPS as ice-repellent surfaces: highly reduced sliding droplet sizes resulting from the extremely low contact angle hysteresis. We show that our surfaces remain essentially frost-free in which any conventional materials accumulate ice. These results indicate that SLIPS is a promising candidate for developing robust anti-icing materials for broad applications, such as refrigeration, aviation, roofs, wires, outdoor signs, railings, and wind turbines.

We use nanoparticle-polymer composites to demonstrate the anti-icing capability of superhydrophobic surfaces and report direct experimental evidence that such surfaces are able to prevent ice formation upon impact of supercooled water both in laboratory conditions and in natural environments. We find that the anti-icing capability of these composites depends not only on their superhydrophobicity but also on the size of the particles exposed on the surface. The critical particle sizes that determine the superhydrophobicity and the anti-icing property are in two different length scales. The effect of particle size on ice formation is explained by using a classical heterogeneous nucleation theory. This result implies that the anti-icing property of a surface is not directly correlated with the superhydrophobicity, and thus, it is uncertain whether a superhydrophobic surface is anti-icing without detailed knowledge of the surface morphology. The result also opens up possibilities for rational design of anti-icing superhydrophobic surfaces by tuning surface textures in multiple length scales.