13. Air-Condition and Refrigeration

In recent years, there have been problems due to ice adhesion. Examples include machine breakdowns and energy loss due to adhesion to equipment and slipping accidents due to icy road surfaces. So, it is important to reveal ice adhesion phenomena and to control the adhesion force. Conventional research has mainly focused on microscale research. However, due to the roughness of the solid surface, the measured adhesion force includes the force that breaks the ice, and it is not possible to measure the ice adhesion force accurately. Therefore, using a scanning probe microscope (commonly known as SPM) developed in previous research, we have made it possible to accurately measure adhesion force at the nanoscale. SPM is located inside the chamber, and liquid nitrogen is used to cool the interior. Temperature and humidity are regulated by using the respective regulation controller devices. First, the relationship between ice height and diameter must be clarified in order to accurately measure adhesion. Therefore, shape measurement is performed first. Next, the adhesion force is measured using the height and diameter of the ice obtained from the shape measurement. In this study, we will use these devices and experimental methods to measure adhesion forces on various test plates and study how adhesion forces change depending on the composition and surface energy of the test plates.