Whether on airplane wings or old refrigerators, frost forms when water droplets nucleate on a surface, grow, coalesce, and finally freeze. Although the interactions between water and surfaces can seem simple, they are remarkably complex (see, for instance, “The first wetting layer on a solid” by Peter Feibelman, Physics Today, February 2010, page 34, and the Quick Study by Laurent Courbin and Howard Stone, Physics Today, February 2007, page 84). To slow down freezing and decrease freezing temperatures, scientists have explored nanopatterned or superhydrophobic surfaces that delay nucleation, for example, or increase droplet mobility. Now Amy Betz and colleagues at Kansas State University show that so-called biphilic surfaces that combine hydrophilic and hydrophobic regions can lower freezing temperatures even further, to as much as −6 °C. The team’s biphilic samples resemble slices of Swiss cheese on crackers: A hydrophilic substrate shows through regularly spaced holes (200 µm...
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1 December 2015
December 01 2015
A study in contrasts for inhibiting surface frost
Physics Today 68 (12), 25 (2015);
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Richard J. Fitzgerald; A study in contrasts for inhibiting surface frost. Physics Today 1 December 2015; 68 (12): 25. https://doi.org/10.1063/PT.3.3013
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