Dear Jianying,

Thank you very much for your reply and your contributing such interesting topics.

Dear Xiaoyan,

Thank you for the point. The scale of PDMS with ordered substructures is limited by the mask size, so it is not easy to get large scale coating by the current technology. What we are doing now is to synthesize porous PDMS with randomly distributed pores, tuning pore size and porosity, and integrate the porous layer to smooth PDMS to realize similar MACI mechanism, see Soft Matter 10.1039/C8SM00820E. In that way, we can synthesize the the large scale coating for practical applications.

Dear Jianying,

Thank you very much for your reply. It is indeed intriguing that there exists a critical size corresponding to the optimal ice adhesion. I just read your paper which is a fantastic work. I have one more question: Can the PDMS film with sub-structures be synthesized as the large-area coating? What’s the large size of the PDMS film with sub-structures? If it works for the large-area coating, it might be widely used for the practical applications of anti-icing.

Dear Xiaoyan,

Thank you for the discussion. The film thickness has a significant effect on the ice adhesion strength via t-1/2. Our current results demonstrate that the PDMS without sub-substructures has a thickness dependent ice adhesion strength when increasing film thickness to around 1 mm. Above that, thickness dependency disappears (He et al, Soft Matter, 2018, 10.1039/C8SM00820E). As for optimal dimension of sub-structures, we found the holes with diameter of 1 mm and height of 3.5 μm show lowest ice adhesion 5.7 kPa, of course combining with film thickness and weight ratio of PDMS, but without lubricant oil. Further investigation of sub-structure size is needed.

Dear Jianying,

Very exciting and inspiring review! I am very interested in your fantastic work about the macro-crack initiator (MACI) approach. In this approach, you first coated the polydimethylsiloxane film and then introduced some specific sub-structures to the film. Such sub-structure can induce the formation of macroscopic cracks between ice and film due to deformation incapability. I have two following questions about details of sub-structures,

(1) Does the film thickness affect the ice adhesion?

(2) What is the featured size of sub-structures corresponding to the optimal anti-icing?