Abstract

Preventing ice accretion on exposed surfaces is important to the operational performance of various facilities and devices. As time elapses and temperature lowers sufficiently, ice accretion becomes inevitable. Herein, we present a new approach to prepare icephobic coatings by incorporating two strategies towards lowering ice adhesion strength, i.e. introducing an aqueous lubricating layer and maximizing macro-crack initiators at the ice-substrate interface. The aqueous lubricating layer is realized by grafting poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) onto polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) coatings, and the macro-crack initiators are induced by introducing macro-scale hollow sub-surface structures into PDMS coatings. By using vertical shear tests, ice adhesion strengths of PAA-g-PDMS (10:1), PDMS coatings with macro-scale hollow sub-surface structures (hPDMS) (10:1), PAA-g-hPDMS (10:1), PAA-g-PDMS (10:10), hPDMS (10:10), and PAA-g-hPDMS (10:10) coatings are obtained as 178.5 ± 22 kPa, 153.1 ± 19 kPa, 122.7 ± 18 kPa, 24.6 ± 4 kPa, 20.3 ± 3.4 kPa and 17.6 ± 3.2 kPa, respectively, showing a reduction of 37.2 %, 46.1 %, 56.8 %, 32.8 %, 44.5 % and 51.9 % when compared with corresponding pure PDMS coatings. These results indicate that ice adhesion strength can be further reduced by simultaneously introducing two strategies. The principle of designing icephobic coatings by combining two or more strategies to reduce ice adhesion to as low as possible provides a new avenue to the preparation of icephobic coatings, and makes practical applications possible under extremely severe conditions.

Highlights

  • Preventing ice accretion on exposed surfaces is important to the operational performance of various facilities and devices, such as power lines, vehicles, aircrafts, wind turbines, and oil drilling rigs [1,2,3]

  • If macro-scale hollow sub-surface structures are introduced into pure PDMS (10:1) coatings, ice adhesion strength of hPDMS coatings is reduced to 153.1 ± 19 kPa and shows a reduction for ice adhesion as 46.1 %, which is caused by the occurrence of macro-crack initiators at the ice-substrate interface during a shear test

  • We present a new approach to prepare icephobic coatings by combining two strategies towards lowering ice adhesion, i.e. introducing an aqueous lubricating layer and maximizing macro-crack initiators at the ice-substrate interface

Read more

Summary

Introduction

Preventing ice accretion on exposed surfaces is important to the operational performance of various facilities and devices, such as power lines, vehicles, aircrafts, wind turbines, and oil drilling rigs [1,2,3]. There are various strategies proposed towards the design of icephobic surfaces by lowering ice adhesion, as shown, including (super-)hydrophobic surfaces [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14], polyelectrolyte polymer brushes [15,16,17], aqueous lubricating layers [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25], organic lubricating layers [26,27,28,29,30], low elastic modulus surfaces [31,32,33,34,35,36], and multi-scale crack initiator-promoted icephobic surfaces [3,4,5,37,38]. This approach provides a new insight into the design of icephobic coatings with low ice adhesion strength

Chemical materials
Preparation of SU8 patterns
Preparation of hPDMS
Preparation of PAA-g-PDMS coatings
Characterization
Ice adhesion strength
X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy
Findings
Conclusions
Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call