Anti-Icing Performance of Superhydrophobic Texture Surfaces Depending on Reference Environments

Materials decorated by the hierarchical micro-nanostructures similar to lotus leaf surface topographies are firmly considered to possess the substantial anti-icing functions, showing icing-delay and low ice adhesion. Here, the aim of this work is to verify the anti-icing capacity in the actual icing environment containing supercooled airflow. This study, therefore, develops both routes to fabricate the hierarchical micro-nanostructure and single nanostructure superhydrophobic surfaces, and first evaluates their anti-icing capacity based on the routine measuring strategies in laboratory. Also, the potential application environment is modeled and used to verify their anti-icing performance for further guiding rational design of surface structures of anti-icing materials. Due to the double-scale effect, the hierarchical micro-nanostructure can induce more air pockets to produce the higher hydrophobicity and anti-icing capacity based on the big reference droplets (diameter > 2 mm) and even static water. However, the verified results in the potential application environment demonstrate that the hierarchical micro-nanostructure exhibits the inferior anti-icing performance, comparing with the single nanostructure. The icing area on the single nanostructure surface is almost half of that on the hierarchical micro-nanostructure surface, also causing a reduction of approximate to 26 g in icing mass.