Hydrogels as Durable Anti-Icing Coatings Inhibit and Delay Ice Nucleation

Beili Huang,Wentao Liu,Xuying Liu,Huige Yang,Shanshan Jiang,Yunhe Diao,Jinzhou Chen

doi:10.3390/molecules25153378

Abstract

The accumulation of ice on surfaces brings dangerous and costly problems to our daily life. Thus, it would be desirable to design anti-icing coatings for various surfaces. We report a durable anti-icing coating based on mussel-inspired chemistry, which is enabled via fabricating a liquid water layer, achieved by modifying solid substrates with the highly water absorbing property of sodium alginate. Dopamine, the main component of the mussel adhesive protein, is introduced to anchor the sodium alginate in order to render the coating applicable to all types of solid surfaces. Simultaneously, it serves as the cross-linking agent for sodium alginate; thus, the cross-linking degree of the coatings could be easily varied. The non-freezable and freezable water in the coatings with different cross-link degrees all remain liquid-like at subzero conditions and synergistically fulfill the aim of decreasing the temperature of ice nucleation. These anti-icing coatings display excellent stability even under harsh conditions. Furthermore, these coatings can be applied to almost all types of solid surfaces and have great promise in practical applications.

Highlights

Ice formation and accumulation on surfaces causes serious problems in our daily life, including the difficulty of operation and high maintenance efforts of ground transportation vehicles and power networks [1,2,3,4,5]
The results demonstrate that our anti-icing hydrogel coatings have the which was measured by maintaining a specific supercooling temperature at −23 ◦ C and recording following advantages: this anti-icing coating can be constructed by immersing allmin, kinds of the time needed for ice 1)
We have developed a new strategy of developing anti-icing coatings which can inhibit and delay ice nucleation

Summary

Introduction

Ice formation and accumulation on surfaces causes serious problems in our daily life, including the difficulty of operation and high maintenance efforts of ground transportation vehicles and power networks [1,2,3,4,5]. Over the past few decades, scientists have proposed two main strategies, active methods and passive methods, for fighting against icing. It is much more desirable to design passive anti-icing surfaces via lowering freezing temperature or reducing ice adhesion, with the benefit of reducing energy consumption [8]. Several strategies have been proposed to depress the freezing temperature, such as ion-infused surfaces [14,15], charged surfaces [16], photothermal surfaces [17], etc

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Discussion

Conclusion