Superhydrophobic surface at low surface temperature

Abstract

Superhydrophobic surfaces have aroused great attention for promising applications, e.g., anti-ice/frost. However, most surfaces which are superhydrophobic at room temperature lose their superhydrophobicity at low surface temperatures. Here, surfaces with different area fractions of the solid surface in contact with the liquid (f1) were designed. It is found that surfaces with f1 equal to or smaller than 0.068 maintain the superhydrophobicity when the surface temperature approaches the dew-point. These results are crucial to understand the correlation between the surface morphology and the superhydrophobicity around the dew-point, and design effective surfaces with desired wettability.