Icing of seawater droplets is capable of causing catastrophic damage to vessels, buildings, and human life, yet it also holds great potential for enhancing applications such as droplet-based freeze desalination and anti-icing of sea sprays. While large-scale sea ice growth has been investigated for decades, the icing features of small salty droplets remain poorly understood. Here, we demonstrate that salty droplet icing is governed by salt rejection-accompanied ice crystal growth, resulting in freezing dynamics different from pure water. Aided by the observation of brine films emerging on top of frozen salty droplets, we propose a universal definition of freezing duration to quantify the icing rate of droplets having varying salt concentrations. Furthermore, we show that the morphology of frozen salty droplets is governed by ice crystals that sprout from the bottom of the brine film. These crystals grow until they pierce the free interface, which we term ice sprouting. We reveal that ice sprouting is controlled by condensation at the brine film free interface, a mechanism validated through molecular dynamics simulations. Our findings shed light on the distinct physics that govern salty droplet icing, knowledge that is essential for the development of related technologies.

Self-propelled droplet motion has applications in various engineering fields such as self-cleaning surfaces, heat transfer enhancement, and anti-icing methods. A superhydrophobic surface was fabricated using two simultaneous chemical reactions with droplet condensation experiments performed on the horizontal superhydrophobic surface to characterize the droplet behavior. The droplet behavior is classified into three types based on their motion features and leftover marks as immobile droplet coalescence, self-propelled droplet jumping, and self-propelled droplet sweeping. This study focuses on the droplet sweeping that occurs due to the ultra-small rolling angle of the superhydrophobic surface, where the resulting droplet sweeps along the surface, merging with all the droplets it meets and leaving a long, narrow, clear track with a large droplet at the end of the track. An easy method is developed to predict the droplet sweeping direction based on the relative positions of the droplets just before coalescence. The droplet sweeping always absorbs dozens of droplets and is not limited by the surface structures; thus, this sweeping has many useful applications. In addition, the relationships between the droplet behavior and the number of participating droplets are also analyzed statistically.