Ice adhesion Strength on Nanostructured Graphite Substrates by Molecular Dynamics Simulations

The issue of ice accumulation at low-temperature circumstances causes multiple problems and serious damages in many civil infrastructures that substantially influence human’s daily life. However, despite the significant consideration in manufacturing icephobic surfaces, it is still demanding to design surfaces with well ice-repellent properties. Here in this study, we used force-probe molecular dynamics simulations to investigate the adhesion mechanism and tensile strength of ice from atomistically smooth and nanotextured graphite substrates. It is found that the ice cube temperature, ice-substrate interfacial energy, size of the surface roughness, the orientation of graphene sheets of graphite surface, and the local order of interdigitated water molecules significantly influence the tensile strength of ice from substrates. Atomistically smooth surfaces are seen to exhibit higher normal failure stress compared to nanostructured graphite substrates. Morover, our results indicate that the MD data for the ice tensile strength on smooth graphite substrate can be collapsed onto two master curves as a function of the ratio between the water-surface interaction energy and ice cube temperature.