Abstract
Ice accumulation on wind turbine blades reduces power generation efficiency and increases wind turbines’ maintenance cost, even causing equipment damage and casualties. In this work, in order to achieve passive anti-icing, a series of nano-pillar array structures with different diameters of from 100 to 400 nm and heights of from 400 to 1500 nm were constructed on the substrate bisphenol-A epoxy resin, which is generally used in the manufacturing of wind turbine blades. The as-constructed functional surface showed excellent water repellence, with a contact angle of up to 154.3°. The water repellence on the nano-pillar array structures could induce ultra-low ice adhesion as low as 7.0 kPa, finding their place in the widely recognized scope of icephobic materials. The underlying solid–ice interface mechanism was well revealed in regard to two aspects: the interface non-wetting regime and the stress concentration behavior on the nano-pillar array structured surface. A detailed discussion on both the factors presented here will help surface structure design and function of icephobic materials, especially for epoxy-based composite materials.
Highlights
Ice accumulation on wind blades affects turbines’ efficiency and makes the corresponding maintenance more expensive and difficult [1,2]
This study investigates the internal relationships between nano-structure, non-wetting behavior, and ice adhesion behavior
The anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) membranes (20 mm × 20 mm × 1 mm) used to fabricate the nano-pillars were purchased from Shenzhen Topmembranes Technology Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, China
Summary
Ice accumulation on wind blades affects turbines’ efficiency and makes the corresponding maintenance more expensive and difficult [1,2]. Various anti-icing/icephobic surfaces were built by imitating natural structures such as the lotus and nepenthes [5,15] to change the interface state by introducing an air layer and a lubricating layer on micro- and nano-structure surfaces [16,17,18,19]. On this basis, researchers have successively fabricated various hierarchically structured superhydrophobic coatings with excellent anti-icing performance [14,20,21].
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