Icing on the surface of aircraft will not only aggravate its quality and affect flight control, but even cause safety accidents, which is one of the important factors restricting all-weather flight. Bio-inspired anti-icing surfaces have gained great attention recently due to their low-hysteresis, non-stick properties, slow nucleation rate and low ice adhesion strength. These bio-inspired anti-icing surfaces, such as superhydrophobic surfaces, slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces and quasi-liquid film surfaces, have realized excellent anti-icing performance at various stages of icing. However, for harsh environment, there are still many problems and challenges. From the perspective of bio-inspiration, the mechanism of icing nucleation, liquid bounce and ice adhesion has been reviewed together with the application progress and bottleneck issues about anti-icing in view of the process of icing. Subsequently, the reliability and development prospect of active, passive and active-passive integrated anti-icing technology are discussed, respectively. © 2022 Nanjing University of Aeronautics an Astronautics. All rights reserved.
