An Investigation of Superhydrophobic/Electrothermal Properties for Graphene/Polyimide/Polydimethylsiloxane Composite Coating

ABSTRACT With the continued popularization of wind power generation in recent years, the anti‐/deicing for wind turbine blades has become imminent. In this paper, the combination of electrothermal deicing and hydrophobic anti‐icing was realized by doping a small amount of graphene (GE) into a polyimide (PI) matrix based on an improved impregnation method and applying a layer of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) on its surface to prepare the GE/PI/PDMS coating. Molecular dynamics simulation has been employed to elucidate the mechanisms by which temperature and the GE doping rate influence the hydrophobicity properties of the GE/PI/PDMS coating at the microscopic level. Computational and experimental results showed that the GE/PI/PDMS coating had a hydrophobic angle of 116.9° at ambient temperature and exhibited superhydrophobicity with the increasing of temperature, which was also demonstrated in the anti‐icing experiments. On the macro‐scale, the macro‐scale based electro‐thermal analysis showed that the average temperature of the GE/PI/PDMS coating can be heated up to more than 120°C in 100 s under 220 V DC voltage, and subsequently melted icing with a thickness of 3.3 cm in 360 s, with a power‐saving efficiency of up to 84%, demonstrating excellent deicing performance.