Engineers from Northwestern University suggest that frost formation can be prevented by modifying the texture of a surface along with applying a thin layer of graphene oxide.

Source: Northwestern University

The engineers suggest that the new scalable surface design, which is also reportedly resistant to cracks, scratches and contamination, could potentially be incorporated into infrastructure and assets.

The researchers developed the new surface design by building upon earlier work confirming that adding millimeter-scale textures to a surface reduced frost formation by up to 80%.

“There is more frost formation on the convex regions of a leaf,” the researchers explained. “On the concave regions [the veins], we see much less frost. People have noticed this for several thousands of years. Remarkably, there was no explanation for how these patterns form. We found that it’s the geometry — not the material — that controls this.”

Upon further investigation and the use of computation simulations, condensation was shown to be enhanced on the peaks and suppressed in the valleys of wavy surfaces. As such, it was concluded that the small amount of condensed water in the valleys evaporates, resulting in frost-free regions.

While the team previously developed the surface featuring millimeter-scale peaks and valleys with small angles in between, their new design now includes the addition of a layer of graphene oxide on flat valleys, which reduced frost formation by 100%.

“Graphene oxide attracts water vapor and then confines water molecules within its structure,” the researchers noted. “So, the graphene oxide layer acts like a container to prevent water vapor from freezing. When we combined graphene oxide with the macrotexture surface, it resisted frost for long times at high supersaturation. The hybrid surface becomes a stable, long-lasting, frost-free zone.”

When measured against other anti-frost surface solutions, this new surface design resisted 100% of frost formation for 160 hours.

An article detailing the findings, “Robust hybrid diffusion control for long-term scalable frost prevention,” appears in the journal Science Advances.