Recent Research on Polymeric Anti-icing Materials

Anti-icing polymeric materials have attracted extensive interest and concerns, as undesired ice accumulation always leads to inconvenience and disasters, in extreme cases even loss of lives of human beings. To deal with the icing problem, molecular mechanisms of ice formation have to be unravelled, which have been pending for more than one hundred years. In this review, we firstly introduce basic instruments for investigating ice formation. In order to reliably evaluate the capability of surfaces on tuning ice nucleation, propagation and adhesion, instruments with controlled environmental conditions, such as humidity and surface temperature, are required. We discuss the set-ups built in our lab for investigating the properties of anti-icing materials. Then we summarize our recent research progress on polymeric materials that can tune ice nucleation, control ice propagation, and reduce ice adhesion. The initial and control step for ice formation is ice nucleation, which often starts on foreign surfaces, i.e., heterogeneous nucleation, and different surfaces possess distinct capabilities in tuning ice nucleation. Via investigating and mimicking the mechanism of antifreeze proteins in the body of organisms living in cold environments, we fabricated polymeric surfaces for regulating the ice nucleation temperature. When ice nucleation triggers freezing of water droplets, ice propagation from frozen water droplets to unfrozen ones follows. In this case, polymeric materials with the functionality of trapping different amount of free water was developed and applied to inhibit ice propagation. Once ice accumulates on solid surfaces, one of the anti-icing strategies is to minimize ice adhesion for easy de-icing. Polymeric materials with aqueous lubricating layer have been prepared and ice on the surface could be blown off under a strong breeze. In addition, solid organogel material with a regenerable solid surface layer is proposed to improve the durability of the materials.