Description
Icing causes many problems in cold climate conditions, where supercooled water droplets hit a surface, freeze and form an ice layer. This accreted ice can, e.g., hinder operations, cause safety problems and increase energy consumption. These, in turn, are causing problems in, e.g., aircraft, renewable energy and construction. Anti-icing and de-icing solutions are suitable ways to minimize these challenges. Furthermore, icephobicity is an important surface property and ice adhesion can be determined as a factor for it. When ice adhesion is low, icephobicity is high, meaning that ice can be removed easily from the surfaces. There are also some connections between icephobicity and surface properties such as wettability, surface topography and chemistry but a clear relationship has not been found because icephobicity depends on several factors and different surfaces have the different main influencing factors.Icing testing is needed to evaluate the performance of the surfaces in different icing conditions and their icephobicity together with durability under environmental stresses. To mimic natural icing, icing testing should be designed to simulate ice accretion phenomena. An icing wind tunnel can be used to accrete ice in different icing conditions, which in turn, influence on ice adhesion. Ice adhesion can be tested with different testing methods. Tampere University has Ice Laboratory, where rime, glaze and mixed glaze ice can be accreted in the icing wind tunnel with the maximum wind speed of 25 m/s and the temperatures from - 0°C down to -35°C. For measuring ice adhesion, centrifugal and pushing type testers are available. For de-icing, electrothermal and gravity-based methods can be used and testing setups can be modified for different surfaces and sample geometries. It is important to understand icing testing conditions when comparing different researches because they are affecting strongly on the results. Icing is a very complex phenomena and therefore, development of icing testing to be more comparable with natural icing is further needed together with icephobic coating and surface development.
This research has partly done in the SOUNDofICE project (EU, H2020-FETOPEN-2018-2019-2020-01 call GA nº: 899352).
| Period | 2024 → … |
|---|---|
| Event title | 2024 IEEE 24th International Conference on Nanotechnology (NANO) |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Gijon, SpainShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |