Abstract It is well-known that ice and ice accretion cause technical challenges and security/safety risks in everyday life and in many industrial sectors such as aviation, energy, and transportation. To minimize these issues, the development of materials and coatings for anti-/de-icing purposes has been under high interest. This research focuses on de-icing by using electrothermal and gravity-based methods to evaluate icing performance of metallic and polymeric materials. For all icing tests, ice was accreted in an icing wind tunnel. Leading-edge profiles from aluminium alloy, stainless steel, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene and with flame-sprayed low-density polyethylene coatings on Al- and Fe-based substrates were tested for de-icing by gravity in ambient temperature whereas in electrothermal de-icing by external heat and gravity, samples were tested in cold conditions. In addition, other material and coating properties such as wetting behaviour, surface roughness, and thermal conductivity were tested to evaluate the effect on icing behaviour. Ice adhesion was measured and compared by using a centrifugal ice adhesion tester as an indicator of the icephobicity of the surfaces. In electrothermal de-icing, thermal properties of the materials are crucial factors, whereas in gravity-based de-icing, icephobicity had a more significant role in the ice shedding.
Oja et al. (Mon,) studied this question.