Epoxy-resin-based Slippery Liquid Infused Anti-icing Coating Based on Breath Figure

Slippery liquid-infused porous surface (SLIPS) is an emerging low-adhesion material that has found wide uses in anti-icing and anti-fouling. However, the poor adhesion of SLIPSs by top-down methods restricts the practical applications of SLIPSs. In the current research, we fabricated an epoxy-based SLIPS with excellent liquid-repellent and anti-icing properties. The porous epoxy resin substrate was primarily constructed by breath figure and then modified with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). Silicone oil was infiltrated within the substrate, serving as the lubricant layer. The hygroscopic polyamine cross-linker plays a crucial role in inducing water droplet nucleation. The surface pore size of the epoxy substrate grows from 4.09 mu m to 5.09 mu m while the porosity increases from 4.73% to 46.67% when the environmental humidity is elevated from (65 +/- 5)% to (95 +/- 5)%. The porous epoxy coatings attach robustly to a variety of metal substrates with an adhesion strength of around 2.2 MPa. After grafting PDMS, the pores were filled with the polymer, which could reserve silicone oil through polymer swelling and capillary sorption. The SLIPS prepared based on the epoxy substrate exhibits an extremely low water sliding angle of 2 degrees, as well as excellent repellence to a variety of liquids including coffee, Chinese ink, milk and even high-viscous honey. On the other hand, the dynamic lubricant layer endows the coating with excellent anti-icing property owing to its low freezing temperature. The coating performs a much longer delay in freezing time (632 s) than those of the glass (21 s) and epoxy coating (94 s), as well as ultralow ice adhesion strength of 1.75 kPa in contrast to the glass substrate (166.9 kPa) and epoxy coating (50.7 kPa), indicating excellent anti-icing performance. The ice adhesion strength on our SLIPS is much smaller than those on commercial and some reported anti-icing coatings. Moreover, no obvious increase in ice adhesion strength can be observed after 20 times tests, displaying outstanding long-term anti-icing property.