Using laser ablation to give metallic surfaces hydrophobic/icephobic properties

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The goal of this Engage project is to support the global player and aircraft manufacturer Pratt & Whitney Canada in the development of new airplane materials that are intrinsically protected against the formation of ice during operation - a constant issue in the long Canadian winters during which mobility needs to be maintained. Through a new university-industry collaboration, which will involve the team of Prof. François Légaré from INRS-ÉMT and the R&D team of Pratt & Whitney Canada, we will develop an optical setup to scale the required surface modification of airplane material from the present laboratory scale to an industrially relevant one. The necessary surface modification is based on material ablation to obtain the so-called Lotus effect. The current laboratory methology of a point-by-point scanning of a single laser focus over a mm sized sample leads to very impressive results in terms of material's hydrophobicity (i.e. water repellence), but is very time consuming and thus not yet applicable to industrial manufacturing processes. The goal of our collaborative effort is to develop a technique based on high power lasers to treat much larger samples in a very short time. This would allow the industrial partner to truly benefit from this cutting edge technology since airplane parts are on the tens of meters scale. Our effort will include a full exploration of the parameter space in terms of pulse duration (from the femtosecond to the 1000 times longer picosecond range, 1femtosecond = 0.000000000000001 second), pulse energy and number of laser shots as well as different methods to treat a large sample area simultaneously. The modified sample surface will be characterized in house and all the results will be closely discussed among the two teams involved, from INRS-ÉMT and Pratt & Whitney. The experimental measurements will be performed at the Advanced Laser Light Source (ALLS) and they will be essential in order to estimate the potential or limitations in terms of processing rates with currently available laser technologies.