Improve The Anti-icing Performance Of Solid Surfaces By Changing Their Wettabilities

Frost is beautiful scenery in nature. However, sometimes it also bringsa lot of inconvenience to people’s production and life. In some importantareas related to national security, such as power transmission,communications network, aviation, navigation, and high-speed railtransportation, will appear different degree of icing, thus significant risksbe brought to the national economic operation. Therefore more and moreattentions have been paid on improving the anti-icing property of materialsurfaces. At present, most methods are based on preparation of anti-icingcoating. More recently, some superhydrophobic surfaces with specialnano-and micro-structures have been demonstrated possessing anti-icingperformance under certain environmental conditions. In this article, weprepare different wettable surfaces and test the anti-icing performance onthe surfaces.In this research, we first compared anti-icing performance ofhydrophilic and hydrophobic glass slide, and found that hydrophobicslides were more favorable in resisting freezing than the hydrophilic ones were. Then we prepared the hydrophilic, highly hydrophilic, hydrophobicand highly hydrophobic surfaces with stainless steel as substrate by usingacid etching and fluorination to research anti-icing performance ofsurfaces with different wettability, and found that highly hydrophobicsurface had excellent anti-icing performance by testing freezing time, icequantity and ice adhesion. Finally, we prepared superhydrophobic coppersurfaces with different nanostructures by wet chemical etching andfluorination and studied their anti-icing performance. Discussed the effectof relative humidity and substrate temperature on the basal anti-icingperformance，found that the higher relative humidity the greater icingamount, the lower substrate temperature the shorter freezing time.Condensate water droplets on superhydrophobic copper surface withnanoribbons will spontaneously move away, and exists in the form ofsupercooled water. As a result, such surface can delay the freezing time.Icing slowly goes forward from the periphery to the center of the surface,we analyzed that is the role of the thermodynamic phase transition drivingforce. Finally, we repeated12times of ice-freezing and ice-meltingexperiments to observe the surface morphology, found that the surface wasno apparent damage. In summary, superhydrophobic copper surface withnanoribbon structure shows good anti-icing performance.