Stearic acid-treated CNT/AgNW membrane for passive anti-icing, active deicing, and water drops monitoring

Passive anti-icing and active deicing methods are urgent need to avoid icing phenomenon for practice. Additionally, introduction of water drops monitoring will aggressively improve the efficiency of icing protection. In this work, a membrane composed by carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and silver nanowires (AgNWs) with properties of super-hydrophobicity, dual-driven heating and sensing performance was fabricated. CNT with photo-thermal effect and hydrophobicity can realize photo-thermal deicing and passive anti-icing. AgNW with great electrical conductivity is competent for electric-heating deicing works. Additionally, stearic acid treatment makes the surface realize super-hydrophobicity. The result manifests that water contact angle of membrane surface reaches to 153.2°, and the sliding angle of membrane is only 6°. Compared with pure polydimethylsiloxane, freezing time of water drop (200 µL) on the membrane surface is delayed apparently. Dual-driven heating property of membrane can eliminate the ice on the surface. The result shows that surface can reach 163 °C at the 6 V voltage supply and 95 °C at the 300 mW/cm² near-infrared irradiation, respectively, and ice (200 µL frozen water) on the membrane surface just take 311 s to be melted by 200 mW/cm² near-infrared irradiation, and 236 s by 5 V voltage supply, respectively. Additionally, membrane encapsulated by flexible materials endow itself with good sensing performance (gauge factor reach 217.8) and cycle stability (≥ 100 cycles), and water drops falling from high place could be detected by membrane clearly. This membrane combines the properties of super-hydrophobic anti-icing, dual-driven heating deicing, and water dropping monitoring together, which is potential to further applied in practice field of icing protection.