Enhancing the Mechanical Durability of Icephobic Surfaces by Introducing Autonomous Self-Healing Function

Abstract

Ice accretion presents a severe risk for human safety. Although great efforts have been made for developing icephobic surfaces (the surface with an ice adhesion strength below 100 kPa), expanding the lifetime of state-of-the-art icephobic surfaces still remains a critical unsolved issue. Herein, a novel icephobic material is designed by integrating an interpenetrating polymer network (IPN) into an autonomous self-healing elastomer, which is applied in anti-icing for enhancing the mechanical durability. The molecular structure, surface morphology, mechanical properties, and durable icephobicity of the material were studied. The creep behaviors of the new icephobic material, which were absent in most relevant studies on self-healing materials, were also investigated in this work. Significantly, the material showed great potentials for anti-icing applications with an ultralow ice adhesion strength of 6.0 ± 0.9 kPa, outperforming many other icephobic surfaces. The material also exhibited an extraordinary durability, showing a very low long-term ice adhesion strength of ∼12.2 kPa after 50 icing/deicing cycles. Most importantly, the material was able to exhibit a self-healing property from mechanical damages in a sufficiently short time, which shed light on the longevity of icephobic surfaces in practical applications.

Interlaboratory Study of Ice Adhesion Using Different Techniques

“…The VST is very common due to its simple and economical set-up and performance, although the location of the force probe impacts the ice adhesion strength greatly [32], and the stress distribution may not be completely uniform [8,17,18]. The VST is commonly in use by several research groups [7,11,[32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39], and has been attempted as a standard for ice adhesion measurement utilizing only commercially available instruments [14]. When comparing reported ice adhesion strengths, it is also necessary to include the type of ice tested.…”

Flourishing Self‐Healing Surface Materials: Recent Progresses and Challenges

“…More recently, Zhuo and co‐workers designed the icephobic surface that not only possessed low adhesion to ice but also can automatically heal mechanical damages in an adequately short time . The Fe‐pyridine dicarboxamide‐containing PDMS (Fe‐Py‐PDMS) was selected as matrix material owing to the low modulus and surface energy.…”

“…More recently, Zhuo and co-workers designed the icephobic surface that not only possessed low adhesion to ice but also can automatically heal mechanical damages in an adequately short time. [157] The Fe-pyridine dicarboxamide-containing PDMS (Fe-Py-PDMS) was selected as matrix material owing to the low modulus and surface energy. The metal-ligand coordination bonds containing in Fe-Py-PDMS was so weak that the creep deformation easily enhanced the high ice adhesion, therefore, to solve this problem, they introduced the commercial PDMS that was cross-linked via covalent bonds to form interpenetrating polymer network (IPN), and the synergistic effect of metal-ligand coordination bonds and covalent bonds resulted in the excellent self-healing and low ice adhesion function as shown in Figure 17b-d.…”

Liquid layer generators for excellent icephobicity at extremely low temperatures

“…For the sake of mechanical robustness, PDMS with the same silicone base as that of silicon rubber was made for LLG 2, as it is one of the most common options for fabricating icephobic coatings. [17][18][19][40][41][42] In particular, silicon wafers with pillars were used as templates for molding PDMS; an example is shown in Fig. S8 (ESI †).…”