Superhydrophobic Coating Prepared by Spraying for Anti-Icing of Glass Insulators

The icing of glass insulators easily triggers flashover, which seriously threatens the safety of power systems. Traditional coatings have poor anti-icing properties and are difficult to be applied in practice. We successfully prepared a superhydrophobic coating on glass slides by one-step spraying. The relationship between spraying pressure, microstructure, wettability and anti-icing performance was investigated. The results indicated that as the spraying pressure increased, the freezing time of the coating first increased and then decreased, while the ice adhesion strength showed a trend of first decreasing and then increasing. This was due to the different rough structures constructed by different spraying pressures. It was found that the coatings prepared at 0.3 MPa had good wettability and anti-icing properties. The contact angle and sliding angle were
$168.3^{\circ}$
and
$4.0^{\circ}$
, respectively. Furthermore, the freezing time and ice adhesion strength were as high as 46.5 min and as low as 55.9 kPa, respectively. This suggests that the prepared superhydrophobic coatings not only retarded icing but also facilitated deicing. It is believed that the present work can provide a reference for the preparation of anti-icing coatings on insulators.