Low-interfacial toughness materials for effective large-scale deicing.

Ice accretion has adverse effects on a range of commercial and residential activities. The force required to remove ice from a surface is typically considered to scale with the iced area. This imparts a scalability limit to the use of icephobic coatings for structures with large surface areas, such as power lines or ship hulls. We describe a class of materials that exhibit a low interfacial toughness with ice, resulting in systems for which the forces required to remove large areas of ice (a few square centimeters or greater) are both low and independent of the iced area. We further demonstrate that coatings made of such materials allow ice to be shed readily from large areas (~1 square meter) merely by self-weight.