  The issue of ice accumulation at low-temperature circumstances causes
multiple problems and serious damages in many civil infrastructures which
substantially influence human daily life. However, despite the significant
consideration in manufacturing anti-icing or icephobic surfaces, it is still
demanding to design surfaces with well ice-repellent properties. Here in this
study, we used all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to investigate ice
shearing mechanism on atomistically smooth and nanotexture graphite substrates.
We find that ice shearing strength strongly depends on ice temperature, the
lattice structure of the surface substrate, the size of the surface nanotexture
structure, and the depth of interdigitated water molecules. Our results
indicate nanoscale surface roughness and depth of interdigitated water
molecules tend to increase ice shear failure stress and for corrugated
substrates, this is further raised with increasing the depth of interdigitated
water molecules which is a result of strain being distributed well into the ice
cube away from the interface. These results supply an in-depth understanding of
the effect of surface nanotexture on ice shearing mechanism that provides
useful information in designing anti-icing surfaces and provide for the
first-time theoretical references in understanding the effect of surface
nanotexture structure and depth of interlocked water on adhesive ice shear
strength on nanotextured surfaces. Keywords: Ice, Graphene, Shear strength,
Molecular dynamics simulation
