Anti-icing/De-icing Mechanism and Application Progress of Bio-inspired Surface for Aircraft

Icing on the surface of aircraft will not only aggravate its quality and affect flight control, but even cause safety accidents, which is one of the important factors restricting all-weather flight. Bio-inspired anti-icing surfaces have gained great attention recently due to their low-hysteresis, non-stick properties, slow nucleation rate and low ice adhesion strength. These bio-inspired anti-icing surfaces, such as superhydrophobic surfaces, slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces and quasi-liquid film surfaces, have realized excellent anti-icing performance at various stages of icing. However, for harsh environment, there are still many problems and challenges. From the perspective of bio-inspiration, the mechanism of icing nucleation, liquid bounce and ice adhesion has been reviewed together with the application progress and bottleneck issues about anti-icing in view of the process of icing. Subsequently, the reliability and development prospect of active, passive and active-passive integrated anti-icing technology are discussed, respectively.