Science Daily September 17, 2018
A team of researchers in the US (Virginia Tec, Oak Ridge National Laboratory) created their anti-frosting surface on untreated aluminum by patterning ice stripes onto a microscopic array of elevated grooves. The microscopic grooves act as sacrificial areas, where stripes of intentional ice form and create low pressure zones. These low-pressure areas pull nearby moisture from the air onto the nearest ice stripe, keeping the overlapping intermediate areas free of frost, even in humid, sub-freezing conditions. These sacrificial ice stripes make up only 10 percent of the material’s surface area, leaving the remaining 90 percent completely dry…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Up to 90% of a surface can exhibit passive antifrosting by using chemical or physical wettability patterns to template “ice stripes” across the surface. Credit: (© ACS)