Understanding Interfacial Ice Premelting: Structure, Adhesion, and Nucleation

The interface of ice with solids plays an exceptionally important role on a wide variety of natural phenomena, such as the melting of permafrost, sliding of glaciers or frost heaving, as well as on many important technological applications such as windmills, car tires, or aircrafts. In this work, we perform a systematic computer simulation study of ice premelting and explore the thickness and structure of quasi-liquid layers formed at the interface of ice with substrates of different hydrophilicities. Our study shows that interfacial premelting occurs systematically on neutral substrates of whatever hydrophilicity, forming films of limited thickness for substrates with contact angles larger than ca. 50° but exhibiting complete interfacial premelting at smaller contact angles. Contrary to most experimental studies, we focus not only on the premelting behavior with temperature, but also with pressure, which is a matter of relevance in important situations such as ice friction. Our study is cast within a rigorous framework of surface thermodynamics, which allows us to show that the premelting film structure is a function of a single thermodynamic variable. By this token we are able to relate properties measured along an isobar, with premelting films at arbitrary temperature and pressure. Our results are also exploited to study ice adhesion, with a view to the understanding of icephobicity. We find that adhesion strength in atomically smooth surfaces is 1 to 2 orders of magnitude larger than those found in experiments, and conjecture that the reason is substrate roughness and the presence of organic adsorbents. Our theoretical framework also allows us to exploit our results on interfacial premelting in order to gain insight into heterogeneous ice nucleation. Our results show that apolar smooth substrates of whatever hydrophilicity are unlikely nucleators, and that too large hydrophilicity conspires also against ice nucleation. Furthermore, we exploit our statistical-thermodynamic framework to shed light on the nature of the surface intermolecular forces promoting interfacial premelting, and provide a model to predict quasi-liquid layer thickness as a function of the substrate’s hydrophilicity with great potential applications in fields ranging from earth sciences to aircraft engineering.