Rational Fabrication of Superhydrophobic Nanocone Surface for Dynamic Water Repellency and Anti-icing Potential

In this work, a simple and economic route was presented to fabricate an anti-icing superhydrophobic surface with nanocone structures, which were constructed only by one-step facile method of hydrothermal treatment with zinc acetate on the aluminum substrate. After modifying with fluoroalkylsilane (FAS-17), the nanocone structures with the appropriate size could induce the high superhydrophobicity with the water contact angle reaching 160.2° ± 0.4° and the sliding angle only being 1° ± 0.5°. Under the dynamic environments, the impact droplets could rapidly bounced off the surface with the shorter contact time of ~10.6 ms, and it was mainly attributing to lower capillary adhesive force (water adhesion force of 4.1 μN) induced by the open system of nanocone structures. Furthermore, the superhydrophobic nanocone surfaces were verified to be a promising anti-icing/icephobic materials, on which the water droplets needed to spend the time of ~517 s to complete the entire freezing process at −10 °C, displaying the increased ~50 times of icing-delay performance comparing with untreated substrate. Even if ice finally was formed on the superhydrophobic nanocone surfaces, it could be easily removed away with lower ice adhesion of ~45 kPa. The repeatable measurement of ice adhesion strength on the same place of the superhydrophobic surface is still far less than the surface ice adhesion of smooth substrate, exhibiting better stability.