Highly interconnected porous PDMS/CNTs sandwich sponges with anti-icing/deicing microstructured surfaces

Three-dimensional flexible porous polydimethylsiloxane (pPDMS) materials are widely used in electronics due to their relatively large specific surface area, and so maintaining the electric charge at a high-humidity atmosphere is an issue that must be addressed. A method for combining centrifuging and hot embossing was proposed for rapid mass production of highly interconnected pPDMS sandwich sponges with microstructure on top layer. As optimized sacrificial templates, the salts were rearranged in the PDMS by this method, and so the high connectivity facilitated salts dissolving in 3 h, which greatly improved the efficiency of the whole fabrication period. The weight ratio of PDMS to salt was 1.0–3.5, and the porosity can be kept at ~ 70%. The combination of micron-scale truncated cones and highly interconnected pore structure endowed the sponge surface with a contact angle of up to ~ 153° and ice adhesion strength as low as ~ 6.78 kPa. The strategy to combine passive anti-icing with active deicing is to prepare PDMS/CNTs sandwich sponges with microstructure on top layer. For the PDMS/CNTs (7 wt%) sandwich sponge, the results show that the elongation at break is as high as ~ 161% and the stress is as low as ~ 23 kPa. Besides, its surface temperature rose rapidly from 25 to 100 °C in 10 s through far-infrared light (808 nm) irradiation, achieving a remote deicing effect. The superhydrophobic and anti-icing/deicing sponges with high toughness property are expected to be of use for further applications.