A sudden-melting event during water freezing inside a copper well

Abstract

We studied the freezing of super-cooled water inside a millimeter-sized copper well by confocal microscopy. During freezing, we surprisingly observed a novel melting scenario, which we call a ‘sudden-melting event’: the ice directly above the bottom substrate suddenly melts in the late stage of the freezing process, while the system is continuously being cooled. After this event, an empty gap around 10 μm to 20 μm between the substrate and the bulk ice is formed. Because this gap occupies the majority of the area of the bottom substrate, the adhesion between the bulk ice and the substrate is greatly reduced: the adhesion force decreases by more than 50% compared with the flat-substrate situation. We further discovered that air dissolved in water plays a crucial role in this melting event: the air excluded by water freezing produces inter-connecting channels in the bulk ice, which transport the warm water produced by latent heat to the substrate which causes the sudden melting event. Because this event makes the contact between ice and substrate very poor, and greatly reduces ice adhesion, our observation may lead to a promising anti-icing method on solid substrates. Compared to the prevalent super-hydrophobic surface technique, our approach only requires millimeter-sized wells instead of complex microscopic textures. Therefore, it is much easier and cheaper to produce, as well as much more robust for large-scale practical applications.