Glaze icing on superhydrophobic coating prepared by nanoparticles filling combined with etching method for insulators

Abstract

Icing on insulators may cause flashover or even blackout accidents in the power transmission system. However, there are few anti-icing techniques for insulators which consume energy or manpower. Considering the water repelling property, the superhydrophobic surface is introduced for anti-icing of insulators. Among the icing forms, the glaze icing owns the highest density, strongest adhesion, and greatest risk to the power transmission system but lacks researches on superhydrophobic surface. In this paper, superhydrophobic surfaces with contact angle of 166.4°, contact angle hysteresis of 0.9°, and sliding angle of less than 1° are prepared by nanoparticle filling combined with etching method. The coated glass slide and glass insulator showed excellent anti-icing performance in the glaze icing test at -5°C. The superhydrophobicity and anti-icing property of the coatings benefit from the low surface energy and hierarchical rough structure containing micron scale pits and nanoscale coralloid bulges supported by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) characterization.