I don’t think any of the stuff works on an aircraft.
It depends on how you define “works”. As I wrote, I’m not aware of a solution that works on its own. In this regard, it’s pretty much useless. IIRC, one paper mentioned formation of frost as an example and after that it’s useless. However, when you add heating (be that electrical or bleed air), efficiency is increased. In that paper, energy required to keep a specified section of a wing clean was reduced to one fifth (in wind tunnel tests), IIRC, that is five-fold increase in efficiency. That might be interesting.
Here is yet another family of icephobic coatings. Unlike the products already discussed here, they are to be added to the paint itself rather than applied on top of it.
Looks good, but it’s interesting they reckon they can mix 10% of this stuff into those paints without affecting their properties.
Multiple threads on same topic merged. One of the products was tested further back and didn’t do anything, even though it repelled water beautifully on the ground.
They offer an interesting explanation why hydrophobic coatings oftentimes don’t repel ice:
“Rough and particles containing superhydrophobic surfaces effectively repel water but do not always repel ice. The problem is the mechanism of action of superhydrophobic coatings. Superhydrophobic coatings capture air within the surface creating high greater than 140° water contact angles. In humid and cold conditions, water droplets can form within the rough superhydrophobic coating by condensation. After condensation, water droplet nuclei create water-loving and ice-loving patches. Under certain high humidity cold conditions superhydrophobic surfaces become neither hydrophobic nor icephobic. The IceSlip coatings and additives provide a smooth, slippery and low surface tension surface that is ice repellent.”
Might explain Peters observation that the ice actually took longer to melt on the treated surface than on the normal paint.
