You are currently viewing the abstract.
View Full TextLog in to view the full text
AAAS login provides access to Science for AAAS members, and access to other journals in the Science family to users who have purchased individual subscriptions.
More options
Download and print this article for your personal scholarly, research, and educational use.
Buy a single issue of Science for just $15 USD.
Easy ice removal
The accumulation of ice on a surface can lead to hazardous conditions, such as on the surface of an airplane wing or the side of a tall building. Ice adhesion, even to a surface treated to minimize the bonded force, will usually depend on the amount of surface coverage. Golovin et al. compared strength-limited deicing with toughness-limited deicing. Whereas normal deicing materials focus on minimizing the adhesion strength, the authors show that if a material is designed with low-adhesion toughness, deicing is no longer a function of the coverage area.
Science, this issue p. 371
Abstract
Ice accretion has adverse effects on a range of commercial and residential activities. The force required to remove ice from a surface is typically considered to scale with the iced area. This imparts a scalability limit to the use of icephobic coatings for structures with large surface areas, such as power lines or ship hulls. We describe a class of materials that exhibit a low interfacial toughness with ice, resulting in systems for which the forces required to remove large areas of ice (a few square centimeters or greater) are both low and independent of the iced area. We further demonstrate that coatings made of such materials allow ice to be shed readily from large areas (~1 square meter) merely by self-weight.
This is an article distributed under the terms of the Science Journals Default License.
