Icephobic materials: Fundamentals, performance evaluation, and applications

Ice accretion may cause malfunction or serious performance degradation in outdoor facilities and structures, such as aircraft, ship, locks and dams, offshore platforms, solar panels, wind turbines, power transmission towers and lines, and sports facilities, leading to huge economic loss or even loss of human lives. Icephobic materials, typically applied in the form of coatings, have received growing attention in the last decade. This review focuses on recent research progress in water wetting state, ice nucleation, and ice adhesion from both theoretical and application perspectives. After a short introduction, static and dynamic water wetting behaviors are reviewed, with an emphasis on reducing the water adhesion at low temperatures. Ice nucleation theories have been applied to investigate how the surface texture affects the ice nucleation behavior, which in turn could be used to explain various observed icing delays. Icephobic performance tests at lab scale are then introduced, before several application examples of icephobic materials are illustrated. This review ends up with discussions of some outstanding issues and challenges faced by this research community, keeping in mind the complexity of different environment in which practical applications are taking place.