Freezing causes serious damage to various fields such as aviation, industry, and telecommunication business. Ice formation can be divided into freezing rain and frost. One of the most effective approach for anti-icing is coating manner because it does not require energy consumption. However, there are few reports of anti-icing coating which prevent ice formation caused by freezing rain and frost formation at the same time. Here, we fabricated the anti-icing coating consist of hydrophobic particles and hygroscopic polymer as shown in Figure A. Hydrophobic particles play a role of repelling supercooled water droplet and hygroscopic polymer plays a role of suppressing frost formation by humidity sink effect: water vapor pressure can be locally depressed below the saturation pressure through the presence of a hygroscopic material to prevent frost formation. As in Figure B, anti-frosting behaviors of anti-freeze coatings (see a legend of coating I-IV in Figure B) are compared in the condition at -10 and 50%RH. It was found that superhydrophobic and hygroscopic surface (coating IV) delayed frost formation compared with simply superhydrophobic surface (coating II). In addition, superhydrophobicity of the coating IV has advantage in terms of freezing rain resistance compared with simply hygroscopic surface (coating III) (Figure C).

Superhydrophobic and hygroscopic surface as an effective anti-icing coating

255th National Meeting (2018)

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