Controllable Freezing Transparency for Water Ice on Scalable Graphene Films on Copper

Abstract: Control of water ice formation on surfaces is of key technological and economic importance, but the fundamental understanding of ice nucleation and growth mechanisms and the design of surfaces for controlling water freezing behaviour remain incomplete. Graphene is a two-dimensional (2D) material that has been extensively studied for its peculiar wetting properties with liquid water incl. a heavily debated wetting transparency. Furthermore, graphene is the parent structure of soot particles that are heavily implicated as nuclei in atmospheric ice formation and consequently graphene is often used as a model surface for computational ice nucleation studies. Despite this, to date experimental reports on ice formation on scalable graphene films remain missing. Towards filling this gap, we here report on the water freezing behaviour on scalably grown chemical vapour deposited (CVD) graphene films on application-relevant polycrystalline copper (Cu). We find that as-grown CVD graphene on Cu can be (as we term it) freezing transparent i.e. the graphene presence does not change the freezing temperature curves of liquid water to solid ice on Cu in our measurements. Such freezing transparency has to date not been considered. We also show that chemical functionalization of the graphene films can result in controllable changes to the freezing behaviour to lower/higher temperatures and that also the observed freezing transparency can be lifted via functionalization. Our work thereby introduces the concept of freezing transparency of graphene on a metal support and also introduces scalable CVD graphene/Cu as an ultimately thin platform towards control of ice nucleation behaviour on a technologically highly relevant metal.