Slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces or SLIPS were first introduced in 2011 by Wong et al. who reported a bioinspired self-repairing surface with remarkable slippery properties. Generally, production of these surfaces includes fossil-based or expensive materials and processes that are available mainly in laboratory scale. In this study, slippery surfaces with sliding angles of less than 10° are obtained using fibre-based material – paperboard – that is commercially available in large-scale and also cheap compared to substrates generally used in this field. The hierarchical nanostructure that is a necessary condition for appropriate droplet mobility was obtained by the liquid flame spray method. This method is fast, scalable, has a variety of optimization parameters and can be utilized in roll-to-roll technology that is traditional in paper industry. In this work, paperboard serves not only as a substrate, but also as a reservoir for the lubricant, thus it is important to evaluate the affinity of the material for the oils and estimate the capillary movement. Therefore, Cobb and Klemm methods were used when choosing a paperboard material. In addition to synthetic oils, rapeseed oil was also utilized as a lubricant, which potentially leads to eco-friendly and recyclable slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces.
Due to the ability of oils to penetrate into the structure of polymers, it is possible to create slippery surfaces with low water droplet sliding angles based on polymer coatings. Polylactic acid, polybutylene succinate and low‐density polyethylene extrusion coatings were used as such surfaces in this study. The process of penetration of vegetable oils into the polymers was studied with the subsequent investigation of slippery behaviour of such system. Cottonseed oil and castor oil showed promising properties as lubricants. For oil infused polymer surfaces the water droplet sliding angles were significantly lower than for the untreated extrusion coating. The penetration of the permeant into the upper layers of the coating was confirmed by alteration of the static water contact angle, sliding angle and also by the cross section images. LDPE extrusion coating infused with castor oil showed the lowest water sliding angle − 8°. Biopolymers, being a main focus in this study, exhibited also promising results, PLA reached sliding angle of 14° with both olive and castor oil. Dependence of polymer permeability on various factors is rather complex and the wide range of oils used in this work helps to interpret the barrier performance of the studied materials. Degree of bond saturation, viscosity and polarity were found to influence mostly on the oil permeation through the studied polymers.