Design and fabrication of a large-area superhydrophobic metal surface with anti-icing properties engineered using a top-down approach

Recently, the development of durable hydrophobic surfaces has received much attention, with anti-icing applications in harsh environments such as aircrafts, wind turbines, power lines, and marine vessels. In this paper we describe a design methodology employing a lattice Boltzmann method to determine the optimal geometry of microstructures to achieve superhydrophobicity. We describe a top-down fabrication method to form superhydrophobic micro-hierarchical metal surface using photolithography, nanoimprinting, and continuous metal-to-metal replication using pulse-reverse-current electrochemical deposition. The surfaces were formed of nickel, which has a large hardness and is resistant to corrosion, making it suitable for use in harsh external conditions. We compared the measured wettability of fabricated micro-hierarchical metal surface with that from numerical simulations. The contact angle and contact angle hysteresis of four metal surfaces were measured (i.e., a bare surface, a random nanostructured surface, an engineered nanostructured surface, and an engineered hierarchical structured surface), and the anti-icing properties of these four metal surfaces were investigated.