Liquid-like slippery surface with passive-multi active strategy integration for anti-icing/de-icing

Icing formation can cause tremendous economic losses and pose a severe threat to equipment safety. To mitigate icing problems, both active de-icing and passive anti-icing materials have been utilized. Traditional active electro-thermal methods suffer from energy consumption, low efficiency, while passive slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces meet the challenges of stability during icing/de-icing cycles. In this study, a bilayer antiicing/deicing coating combined with active photo-/electro-thermal and passive slippery properties was proposed. The prepared coating exhibited ultra-slippery, reducing ice adhesion and stability properties benefit by covalently grafting polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) brushes in a cross-linked skeleton of epoxy. Moreover, both electricity and solar energy can be adopted for heating the surface, showing high efficient electro-thermal/photothermal promoted anti-icing/de-icing properties. The composite coating can reduce 29% electricity consumption and 47% de-icing time by virtue of slippery and photo-thermal properties. This functional slippery electro-/photo thermal coating with high-efficient anti-icing and de-icing performances may have broad application prospects in various industry fields.

Automated summary

This study proposes a bilayer anti-icing/deicing coating with active photo-/electro-thermal and passive slippery properties, which can reduce energy consumption and de-icing time, and has broad application prospects.