Liquid-infused nanostructured surfaces with extreme anti-ice and anti-frost performance.

By Philseok Kim, Tak-Sing Wong, Jack Alvarenga, M. Kreder, Wilmer E Adorno-Martinez, Joanna Aizenberg. ACS Nano, 2012

1,218 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Mechanics of Materials, Surfaces, Coatings and Films

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4c61b429f16063f65b99c18921f82fa8ad9dfd42

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Citations in the corpus

Design of anti-icing surfaces: smooth, textured or slippery? (2016, positive): “Inspired by this approach, a variety of fabrication techniques for producing functional slippery surfaces have been reported, expanding the types of materials and potential applications this technology can impact 30–37 .”
A Review of Condensation Frosting (2017, background): “Alongside superhydrophobic substrates, liquid-infused surfaces (SLIPS) have also been reported to demonstrate low contact angle hysteresis as well as low ice adhesion strength, facilitating both thermal [66, 131, 170] and mechanical defrosting [66, 151].”
A survey of icephobic coatings and their potential use in a hybrid coating/active ice protection system for aerospace applications (2019, background): “This engineered composite structure has a combination of low contact angle hysteresis (for water droplets to roll off the surface) and low ice adhesion of 16 kPa [41].”
A novel superhydrophobic hybrid nanocomposite material prepared by surface-initiated AGET ATRP and its anti-icing properties (2014, background): “[48] Kim P, Wong T S, Alvarenga J, et al.”