Impact icing is widespread in aerospace, power and energy, transportation and other industrial fields, where the impingement and subsequent freezing of supercooled water droplets on component surfaces pose a serious threat to the low-temperature service safety and operational efficiency of equipment. As a core surface characteristic parameter, surface roughness directly alters the droplet impingement retention behavior, ice accretion growth and ice-substrate interfacial bonding state, and thus determines the difficulty of subsequent de-icing operations. In this work, cylindrical specimens with a diameter of 40 mm and a thickness of 10 mm were fabricated with 6061 aluminum alloy as the substrate. The curved surfaces of the cylinders were treated by graded sanding with sandpapers and calibrated with a roughness tester, to obtain three groups of standard specimens with arithmetic mean surface roughness Ra of 0.4 μm, 0.6 μm and 0.8 μm, respectively. Impact icing tests were carried out in a calibrated small-scale recirculating icing wind tunnel, which could stably reproduce the actual in-flight icing environment with supercooled droplets. The key calibrated parameters were set as follows: droplet volume median diameter of 12.40 μm, wind speed of (8±0.5) m/s in the test section, and liquid water content of (2±0.2) g/m3. Three ambient temperature levels (-6, -9, -12 ℃) and three icing durations (5, 10, 15 min) were selected as control variables, and targeted test condition matrices were designed for different evaluation indicators. For icing morphology and icing mass measurements, 27 groups of full-factorial test conditions were adopted with three roughness levels, three temperature levels and three icing durations. For icing density measurements, the icing duration was fixed at 5 min with 9 groups of test conditions covering three roughness levels and three temperature levels. For tangential adhesion strength measurements, the icing duration was fixed at 10 min with 9 matching groups. The cross-sectional photography method was employed to capture ice shape images, and the icing area was calculated via an edge detection algorithm. Based on Archimedes' buoyancy principle, an improved liquid displacement method using low-temperature glycerol-antifreeze mixed solution instead of pure water was applied in combination with an MH-600A electronic densitometer, which effectively avoided measurement errors caused by ice melting and solution infiltration into ice pores. Meanwhile, a tangential adhesion strength test system was established inside the wind tunnel, and the tangential adhesion strength at the ice-substrate interface was calculated according to the peak load. On this basis, the single-factor influence laws of icing duration, ambient temperature and surface roughness on icing morphology, icing mass, icing density and interfacial adhesion strength, as well as the pairwise interactive coupling effects among the three factors were systematically analyzed. The results showed that: in terms of icing morphology, the ice body extended in a fan-like pattern along the upper and lower sides of the cylinder with increasing icing duration. As ambient temperature decreased, the icing type gradually transformed from glaze ice to mixed ice and then to rime ice. Surface roughness had no significant effect on icing type, but slightly increased the icing area and expanded the circumferential coverage of the ice layer. This trend became more pronounced with extended icing duration and was more prominent under low-temperature conditions. In terms of icing mass, its growth rate remained relatively stable with increasing icing duration, followed a trend of first increasing and then decreasing with decreasing temperature, and showed a continuous upward trend with increasing roughness. In terms of icing density, it exhibited a monotonically decreasing trend with decreasing temperature, and the magnitude of decrease varied significantly across temperature ranges: at -6 ℃, the icing densities of the three specimens with different roughness were 745, 732 and 675 kg/m3, respectively; at -9 ℃, the values were 654, 629 and 591 kg/m3, respectively; at -12 ℃, they dropped to 513, 504 and 471 kg/m3, respectively. Icing density decreased slowly with increasing roughness, and this pattern was more remarkable under low-temperature conditions of -9 ℃ and -12 ℃. In terms of interfacial adhesion strength, all load curves exhibited the mechanical behavior of "rapid ascent-peak plateau — sharp descent" under all test conditions. The maximum adhesion strength increased significantly with increasing roughness: at -6 ℃, the adhesion strengths of the three specimens were 268, 337 and 395 kPa, respectively; at -9 ℃, the values were 363, 440 and 498 kPa, respectively; at -12 ℃, they reached 411, 543 and 562 kPa, respectively. Under the same roughness condition, adhesion strength increased notably with decreasing temperature, but its growth rate gradually slowed down as temperature drops further. This study clarifies that icing duration affects the icing characteristics of aluminum alloy surfaces mainly through the cumulative effect. Ambient temperature presents a bidirectional competitive microscopic mechanism: it strengthens hydrogen bond adsorption on the one hand, and weakens adhesion via porous rime ice on the other. Surface roughness achieves hierarchical regulation through two pathways: increasing nucleation density to loosen the ice structure, and forming mechanical interlocking to enhance adhesion. The quantitative test data and microscopic mechanism obtained in this study can provide theoretical basis and data support for the design of passive anti-icing aluminum alloy surfaces and the optimization of anti-icing and de-icing systems.
Key words
aluminum alloy /
surface icing /
surface roughness /
ice formation characteristics /
adhesion characteristics
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Funding
National Natural Science Foundation of China (52076035); Basic Scientific Research Business Expenses Project of Universities Affiliated to Hebei Province (JQN2021016) and Young Teachers Development Fund of School of Metallurgy and Energy Engineering (RN20244136)
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