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Ice formation and accretion on windows of buildings and windshields of automobile lead to various inconveniences and operational difficulties in cold regions. To prevent ice accretion and fasten ice removal on glass, a new generation of transparent deicing materials with high efficiency and energy saving is highly expected through low-cost approaches. However, conventional anti-icing/deicing coatings are opaque materials that are difficult to implement on automotive glass and building windows. As a typical photothermal semiconductor material, Cu2-xS has high near infrared (NIR) light absorbance and excellent photothermal conversion realized by excitation and relaxation of electron-hole pairs, which differs from noble metal nanoparticles. The unique advantage makes Cu2-xS is used widely in photothermal tumor and cancer therapy, while the application in anti/deicing area is limited. Here, we develop a low-cost transparent photothermal nanocomposite coating based on solution-processed Cu2-xS for active photothermal deicing. The photothermal nanocomposite coating was first prepared by the integration of Cu2-xS nanoparticles and commercially available acrylic paints, and then brushed onto glass surfaces of automobile and buildings. The deicing results show that when exposed to the near-infrared laser illumination at the wavelength of 808 nm, the surface coating temperature of glass covered with 3mm ice layer rapidly increases over 30℃ and the ice layer melts in 300 seconds at different ambient temperatures of -16 ℃, -20℃ and -24℃, demonstrating the high light-to-heat conversion efficiency and remarkable deicing property of transparent photothermal coating under extreme cold conditions. This study of transparent photothermal nanocomposite coating fabricated by simple brushing method provides enormous potential for ice removal applications on glass in building structures and automobile without highly affecting the visible transmittance, which is expected for further development in various shaped components.
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