Facilely Fabricating Superhydrophobic Resin-based Coatings with Lower Water Freezing Temperature and Ice Adhesion for Anti-icing Application

This work is focused on the development of a facile strategy to fabricate superhydrophobic coatings, which are characterized with lower water freezing temperature and lower ice adhesion. First, a kind of polyacrylic acid (PAA) based resin material is synthesized as the coating-matrix. Then the functionally-modified SiO2 nanoparticles are added to regulate the surface morphology for obtaining the ideal superhydrophobicity. The as-synthesized resin coatings possess strong bonding strength with metal substrate, and the surface hierarchical morphologies (10 wt% SiO2 nanoparticles) induce the robust superhydrophobicity with a high water contact angle of 152°. Also, the superhydrophobic coatings are endowed with high icephobicity, and the freezing temperature of reference water droplet is reduced to −20.33°C comparing with that (−13.83°C) on the coatings without additive nanoparticles. Furthermore, the ice adhesion strength on the superhydrophobic coatings is only 250 kPa, exhibiting the great ability of ice repellence.