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Super important question, first thing that came to mind. How would you even test it for efficacy? Just look for ice building up and say 'welp, time for refinish?'

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There are wind tunnels for testing icing behaviors, not too hard to do an accelerated aging test and come up with standard procedures.

Could be easier said than done. There are lots of edge cases that could become a problem in real use. Stuff like surface contamination from various fluids or environmental factors.

Do 90% of your testing in the wind tunnel, and sanity check your results by flying it for real.

Also the feature size is in μm range, so I imagine a flashlight or barcode gun shaped UV camera device to observe interference or reflectivity would be possible.

Turn off wing anti-ice, fly around, if you get ice buildup you turn anti-ice back on?

Having anti-ice on decreases performance and increases fuel use. So being able to fly without anti-ice on for longer is better.

Would be nice to save weight on full size anti ice systems. Flying around to test anti icing is also not the greatest approach. If ice starts to build up and you shed it, it can come off in chunks and break things.

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