General frost growth mechanism on solid substrates with different stiffness.

Preventing or delaying frost formation on surfaces is of significant importance in many aspects of our daily life. Despite many efforts and improvements recently achieved in the design of new icephobic materials and substrates, not all proposed solutions are universally applicable and frost formation still remains a problem in need of further flexible solutions. In this respect, we propose to take benefit from the tunable viscoelastic properties of soft polymer gel substrates, since they are known to strongly influence the dropwise condensation process of water, and to investigate condensation frosting on them. Using polymer gels with different stiffness and a hard substrate as a reference, we demonstrate their ability to delay frost formation compared to recent results reported in the literature on other solid substrates and in particular on superhydrophobic surfaces. By investigating the frost front propagation we singled out a general behavior of its dynamic evolution consisting of two processes presenting two different time scales. This general growth appears to be independent of experimental conditions as well as substrate stiffness.