Droplet re-icing characteristics on a superhydrophobic surface

Water icing is a natural phase change phenomenon which happens frequently in nature and industry and has negative effects on a variety of applications. Deicing is essential for iced surfaces, but even for a nanoengineered superhydrophobic surface, deicing may be incomplete with many adherent unmelted ice droplets which have potential for reicing. Here, we focused on the reicing characteristics of droplets on a solid superhydrophobic surface, which has lacked attention in previous studies. Our results show that the nucleation and ice crystal growth characteristics of a reicing droplet are quite different from those of a first-time icing droplet. During reicing, secondary nucleation due to fluid shear always occurs first on the edges of unmelted ice, accompanied by fast-growing ice crystals that can trigger heterogeneous nucleation when in contact with the solid surface. The reicing takes place under very small supercooling (less than 0.5 °C), and the superhydrophobic surface does not play a key role, meaning that any current icephobic surfaces lose their features, which poses great challenges for anti-icing. In addition, because of the small supercooling, no recalescence phenomenon appears during reicing and the droplet remains transparent instead of clouding. Owing to the unmelted ice floating on the top of the droplet, the droplet shape after reicing is also distinguishing from that after normal icing, but the pointy tip formation during reicing and normal icing shows a uniformity. These results shall deepen the understanding of the anti-icing and deicing physics.