Concurrently Enhancing Durability and Stability of Superhydrophobic Anti-Icing Surfaces via Dual-Peak Microstructure Design.

Ice accumulation on surfaces poses severe challenges across industrial sectors. Superhydrophobic surfaces have shown great potential for anti-icing due to their excellent water repellency and extremely low ice adhesion. Nevertheless, resolving the inherent trade-off among mechanical durability, performance stability, and excellent water repellency/icephobicity remains a formidable obstacle hindering their practical applications. In this work, we propose a function-decoupled design principle, demonstrating a collaborative system that integrates a mechanically robust base region with an icephobic functional top region. Guided by this principle, a dual-peak structure was specifically designed and experimentally fabricated using an ultrafast laser processing technique. By systematically adjusting the key geometrical factors of the dual-peak (DP) structure along both the lateral and height directions, we identified an optimized configuration that exhibits exceptional anti-icing and antifrosting performances, including (i) maintaining ice adhesion strength below 10 kPa even after over 100 deicing cycles-the lowest value reported to date for superhydrophobic surfaces as far as we know, (ii) realizing superior frost delay with a remarkable frost retardation time of 21,650 s at a low temperature of -15 °C and a vapor supersaturation degree of 866.9%, and (iii) achieving excellent resistance toward dynamic supercooled droplet impacts under different temperatures as low as -25 °C and different impact velocities as high as 2.19 m/s. This work can advance the rational design of durable and stable superhydrophobic and icephobic surfaces, offering innovative insights into practical anti-icing applications in extreme environments such as aviation and power infrastructure.