mightily appeal to many researchers to develop an anti-icing method without energy consumption by mimicking the plant surface topographies. [1][2][3][4][5][6] As well known, the famous Lotus Effect is widely used and induces to construct the hierarchical topography of composite micronanostructures in favor of entrapping more air pockets to repel water and finally realize the aim of preventing ice accumulation. [7][8][9][10][11] Also, many theoretical and experimental studies have been reported that the trapped air pockets play a thermal insulation role in preventing the freezing of supercooled water, and cause a remarkable reduction in solid/liquid contact area. [8,9,12,13] The resultant situation is that triggering ice nucleation gets more difficulty due to the increasing energy barrier, finally showing a certain extent of icingdelay performance. [14,15] Furthermore, the air pockets can be remained after freezing and serve as the original microcracks to reduce the ice adhesion strength, resulting in the adhered ice being extremely easily removed. [16][17][18] After a comprehensive insight into these reported literatures, the real anti-icing potential of hierarchical micro-nanostructure superhydrophobic surface needs to be further confirmed in the involved application environments due to the obvious distinction (several orders of magnitude) of the volume of reference supercooled droplets.We, therefore, made great efforts to verify the anti-icing capacity of hierarchical micro-nanostructure surfaces through modeling the application environments, not only the routine analyses in laboratory. Here, this work developed both routes to fabricate the superhydrophobic structure surfaces (see Figure 1a), hierarchical micro-nanostructure and single nanostructure surfaces, which were also labeled as hierarchical micronanostructure surface (HN-Surface) and single nanostructure surface (SN-Surface), respectively. The more detailed operating procedures are provided in Experimental Section. According to the previous experience and classical wetting theory, the HN-Surface is expected to entrap more air pockets underneath the droplets and exhibit more robust water repellence than the SN-Surface. [17,19,20] Also, the anti-icing performance should display the similar situation. The supercooled droplets on HN-Surface will take more time to complete the freezing process, and the produced ice can be easily removed under the action of slight external force due to the lower ice adhesion.Materials decorated by the hierarchical micro-nanostructures similar to lotus leaf surface topographies are firmly considered to possess the substantial anti-icing functions, showing icing-delay and low ice adhesion. Here, the aim of this work is to verify the anti-icing capacity in the actual icing environment containing supercooled airflow. This study, therefore, develops both routes to fabricate the hierarchical micro-nanostructure and single nanostructure superhydrophobic surfaces, and first evaluates their anti-icing capacity based on the routine mea...

Superhydrophobic coatings treated as surface functional materials are endowed with great application potential with respect to self-cleaning, drag-reduction, anti-icing, etc.

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