Design of Icephobic Surfaces by Lowering Ice Adhesion Strength: A Mini Review

Ice accretion can lead to severe consequences in daily life and sometimes catastrophic events. To mitigate the hazard of icing, passive icephobic surfaces have drawn widespread attentions because of their abilities in repelling incoming water droplets, suppressing ice nucleation and/or lowering ice adhesion strength. As time elapses and temperature lowers sufficiently, ice accretion becomes inevitable, and a realistic roadmap to surface icephobicity for various outdoor anti-icing applications is to live with ice but with the lowest ice adhesion strength. In this review, surfaces with icephobicity are critically categorized into smooth surfaces, textured surfaces, slippery surfaces and sub-surface textured surfaces, and discussed in terms of theoretical limit, current status and perspectives. Particular attention is paid to multiple passive anti-icing strategies combined approaches as proposed on the basis of icephobic surfaces. Correlating the current strategies with one another will promote understanding of the key parameters in lowering ice adhesion strength. Finally, we provide remarks on the rational design of state-of-the-art icephobic surfaces with low ice adhesion strength.