Abstract
The prevention and control of ice accumulation has important applications in aviation, building construction, and energy conversion devices. One area of active research concerns the use of superhydrophobic surfaces for preventing ice formation. The present work develops a physics-based modeling framework to predict ice formation on cooled superhydrophobic surfaces resulting from the impact of supercooled water droplets. This modeling approach analyzes the multiple phenomena influencing ice formation on superhydrophobic surfaces through the development of submodels describing droplet impact dynamics, heat transfer, and heterogeneous ice nucleation. These models are then integrated together to achieve a comprehensive understanding of ice formation upon impact of liquid droplets at freezing conditions. The accuracy of this model is validated by its successful prediction of the experimental findings that demonstrate that superhydrophobic surfaces can fully prevent the freezing of impacting water droplets down to surface temperatures of as low as -20 to -25 °C. The model can be used to study the influence of surface morphology, surface chemistry, and fluid and thermal properties on dynamic ice formation and identify parameters critical to achieving icephobic surfaces. The framework of the present work is the first detailed modeling tool developed for the design and analysis of surfaces for various ice prevention/reduction strategies.
Highlights
Ice formation adversely affects many aspects of everyday living through frozen windshields, downed power lines and burst pipes
A survey of recent literature indicates growing interest in the use of passive techniques for ice mitigation. Foremost among these is the use of superhydrophobic surfaces for preventing ice formation[3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. This concept draws inspiration from various natural materials, found in both animals and plants, that rely on a combination of surface morphology and surface chemistry to repel water[10,11,12,13,14] from their surfaces
This work developed a new concept that the limited time of contact of impacting liquid on a superhydrophobic surface allows a supercooled water droplet to bounce off the surface before it can freeze, fully preventing ice formation
Summary
Ice formation adversely affects many aspects of everyday living through frozen windshields, downed power lines and burst pipes. This work developed a new concept that the limited time of contact of impacting liquid on a superhydrophobic surface allows a supercooled water droplet to bounce off the surface before it can freeze (even at deep supercooling), fully preventing ice formation. It was seen[8] that superhydrophobic surfaces completely prevent ice formation up to substrate temperatures as low as -20 to -25 °C, whereas the hydrophilic and hydrophobic surfaces lead to significant ice accumulation since the droplets do not rebound completely. The predicted transition temperature for droplet freezing upon impact shows excellent agreement with the experimental data
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