One-piece insulating superhydrophobic photothermal coating for suppression of icing and thermal aging of wind turbine blades

Existing anti-/de-icing coatings often face the problems of insufficient mechanical strength and accelerated aging of the wind turbine blades due to the high temperature in the summer. In this study, an exceptional thermally insulating photothermal superhydrophobic anti-/de-icing coating, designated HGMs@Ni/PDMS (HNP), was fabricated by electroless nickel plating on hollow glass microspheres (HGMs) followed by integration with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The intense chemical reactions during the nickel electroplating process and the scattering effect of nickel metal nanoparticles on light cause the HGMs to change from white to black. Combined with the localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) effect, the coating exhibits excellent photothermal performance, and the surface temperature of the coating could be increased from 20 °C to 66 °C in 100 s under a light intensity of 1000 W·m⁻². The hollow structure of HGMs and the low thermal conductivity of PDMS synergistically give the coating excellent thermal insulation performance, which slows down the thermal aging of the turbine blades while effectively slowing down the release of latent heat during the freezing of the droplets, resulting in the freezing time of HNP-3 at −10 °C being close to 40 min. In addition, the one-piece structure has no interlayer bonding problem, and the nanometer-sized nickel particles grown on the HGMs surface can effectively increase the bonding points with PDMS, resulting in excellent mechanical properties of the coating, together with its simple preparation method, which is suitable for large-area preparation.