Renatured Organohydrogel Coating for Anti-Icing

Ice accumulation poses severe threats to industrial operations and public safety. While integrating antifreeze agents into organohydrogels is a thermodynamically proven anti-icing concept, translating these bulk materials into practical, large-area coatings remains challenging. Current adhesion strategies rely either on intricate surface grafting, which lacks scalability and repairability, or on direct physical attachment, which suffers from weak interfacial bonding. Here, we develop a gel-renaturation strategy for constructing scalable and regenerable organohydrogel anti-icing coatings. This approach decouples polymer-network formation from coating assembly and solvent loading. This coating is fabricated by anchoring poly(acrylic acid-co-N,N-dimethylacrylamide) xerogel particles onto various substrates via an adhesive layer, followed by renaturation with an ethylene glycol aqueous solution. Renaturation-induced dissociation and reconstruction of supramolecular interactions promote interparticle chain entanglement, enabling the fusion of discrete xerogel particles into a continuous coating. The coating exhibits excellent freeze resistance, and achieves an ultra-low ice adhesion strength of below 1 kPa. Moreover, the xerogel-based fabrication enables meter-scale coating on diverse substrates without specialized equipment, while re-renaturation provides a simple route for restoring anti-icing performance after coating degradation. This work establishes a xerogel-mediated gel-renaturation route for translating organohydrogel anti-icing materials into scalable and regenerable coating formats.