In the present study, a comparative study was performed to evaluate the anti-/de-icing performance of a traditional superhydrophobic and a novel ice-phobic coating, on the dynamic icing process over the rotating propeller of a four-rotor Unmanned-Aerial-Vehicles (UAVs). The test was conducted by leveraging an icing test facility at the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, which duplicates the hovering state of a UAV under typical icing conditions. During the experiments, a high-speed imaging system was utilized to record the snapshots of the dynamic icing and ice-shedding details. The detailed icing information was then extracted from the images by using the post-processing code. In addition, the Hall current sensor was used to record the power consumption during the icing process. Two coatings, a traditional Superhydrophobic coating, and an organic-inorganic hybrid ice-phobic coating were applied to achieve ice mitigation and to reduce the penalty during the dynamic icing process. Under a relatively high humidity situation, the application of traditional Superhydrophobic coating was found to have more icing area, showing no observable ice shedding within 200 s icing duration time, which requires 80% more energy to maintain the system to work properly, in comparison to 120% of baseline. The novel ice-phobic coating introduced a new idea to simultaneously achieve relatively high hydrophobicity and high icephobicity, which presents the periodic ice shedding phenomenon during 200 icing duration time, with more than 50% power consumption reduction after ice shedding occurring under the same icing environment, working with only 25% and 20% power consumption level compared to SHS treated case and baseline, respectively.
