Bioinspired Photothermal Superhydrophobic Metamaterial With Structured Micro-Nano Crystal Arrays for Anti-/De-Icing

Unwanted ice accumulation can lead to catastrophic disasters or economic losses. Photothermal superhydrophobic surfaces show promise for anti-/de-icing applications, but their effectiveness depends critically on precise micro-nano hierarchical structure design and functionalization. Current approaches face significant limitations: lithography enables ordered patterns but becomes cost-prohibitive for nanoscale features, while disordered micro-nano structures suffer from poor performance tunability and inconsistency. This study develops a high-performance structured micro/nano-crystal array photothermal superhydrophobic metamaterial (SMNA-PSM) for anti-/de-icing. The structured crystal array features abundant micro-nano surfaces, transforming deposited Metal-insulator-Metal (MIM) structures into heterogeneous resonators. These heterogeneous resonators with varying sizes, angles, and thicknesses possess more electromagnetic wave response sites and scattering surfaces, converting the separated absorption peaks of the uniform MIM structure into a continuous absorption band, achieving 96% solar spectrum absorptivity. Moreover, by simply adjusting the deposition material, the surface morphology of the crystal array can be tuned from smooth to rough, thereby enabling a switch from hydrophobicity to superhydrophobicity. Unlike conventional micro-nano hierarchical structures, structured micro-nano crystal arrays can be integrated with film stacked architectures, inheriting film-based advantages: tunable performance, uniformity, substrate-friendliness, and scalability. This approach demonstrates broad application potential in micro-nano structure fabrication, broadband wave absorption, wettability control, photothermal conversion and anti-/de-icing.