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Coating has been recently considered as having good potential for use in preventing in-cloud icing on the leading edge of the lifting surfaces of an aircraft in cold climates. In terms of wettability, a coat may exhibit hydrophobicity or hydrophilicity depending on its specific properties. The same applies to the ice adhesion strength, which may be either high or low. It is thus necessary to determine which type of anti-icing or de-icing coat would be appropriate for a particular application in order to fully utilize its specific properties. Notwithstanding, a coat is incapable of preventing ice accretion by itself, and a perfect icephobic coat is yet to be developed. Coating is also sometimes applied to the surfaces of electrical heaters and load-applying machines to enable them to function more effectively and use less energy. The coating used for an electric heater, for instance, should be hydrophobic because of the need for rapid removal of molten water from the surface.

An icing process of a single supercooled-water droplet is focused in the present study. A stationary icing as well as an icing of a moving droplet gives us great insights into the development of an ice-prevention system for engineering purpose. For academic purpose, it gives experimental findings in a two-phase flow. To understand the icing process, we applied a luminescent imaging technique. It uses a temperature-sensitive luminophore and a temperature-insensitive luminophore to create the luminescent water. The luminescent outputs from these luminophores are simultaneously captured by a high-speed color camera. By simply taking a ratio, the temperature distribution can be extracted. In this paper, this imaging system is shown with its temperature characterization. An icing process of a stationary droplet is shown in this paper. Also, a current status of an icing process of a moving droplet is shown.