Phys.org October 24, 2022
The body feathers of perpetually ice-free penguins are very good natural examples of anti-icing surfaces, which use two different mitigation strategies for the two disparate problems – water adhesion and ice adhesion. Researchers in Canada constructed the form of the feather’s wire-like structure and decorated it with superimposed nanogrooves by laser micromachining fine woven wire cloths. Post-processing techniques also allowed them to isolate the role of surface chemistry by creating both hydrophilic and hydrophobic versions of the synthetic anti-icing surfaces. Their results showed that water-shedding and ice-shedding characteristics are indeed derived from different physical functions of the hierarchical structure. The microstructure of the woven wire cloth led to facile interfacial cracking and therefore extremely low ice adhesion strengths; the superimposed laser-induced periodic surface structures with hydrophobic surface chemistry led to water shedding. Their work showed that a robust anti-icing surface can be engineered by separately designing the water-shedding functions…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Graphical abstract. Credit: ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2022, 14, 41, 47310–47321, October 4, 2022Â