Oil-Impregnated Hydrocarbon-Based Polymer Films

Abstract

Porous surfaces impregnated with a liquid lubricant exhibit minimal contact angle hysteresis with immiscible test liquids, rendering them ideal as self-cleaning materials. Rather than roughening a solid substrate, an increasingly popular choice is to use an absorbent polymer as the “porous” material. However, to date the polymer choices have been limited to expensive silicone-based polymers or complex assemblies of polymer multilayers on functionalized surfaces. In this paper, we show that hydrocarbon-based polymer films such as polyethylene can be stably impregnated with chemically compatible vegetable oils, without requiring any surface treatment. These oil-impregnated hydrocarbon-based films exhibit minimal contact angle hysteresis for a wide variety of test products including water, ketchup, and yogurt. Our oil-impregnated films remain slippery even after several weeks of being submerged in ketchup, illustrating their extreme durability. We expect that the simple and cost-effective nature of our slippery hydrocarbon-based films will make them useful for industrial packaging applications.

Permeation of vegetable oils and slippery properties of extrusion coated paperboard

“…T A B L E 1 Properties of extrusion coating polymers 9,32 Polymer Formula Density, g/cm 3 Glass The degree of crystallinity was calculated from obtained data using Equation 1.…”

“…6,7 In packaging technology this effect tends to be avoided by utilizing polymers with improved barrier properties or multilayer structure. In case of oil absorption by the polymer, the lubricant is distributed inside a substrate matrix as it was described in publication by Mukherjee et al 3 In that study extruded hydrocarbon-based polymer films were impregnated with lubricating oil to gain slippery properties. Impregnation was enabled by utilizing ultra low-density polyethylene (ULDPE) in combination with vegetable oil that exhibit high chemical compatibility with the polymer film.…”

“…The wicking rate of the oil into hydrocarbon-based polymers is expectedly extremely low; nevertheless, it is sufficient to provide slippery properties after removing excess lubricant from the surface. 3 The aim of the current study is to view more comprehensively the process of wicking or penetration of vegetable oils into polymers with the subsequent investigation of slippery properties of such system. In this work, extrusion coating on paperboard was used as a substrate to mimic the real packaging unit.…”

Paperboard as a substrate for biocompatible slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces

“…Along with superhydrophobic materials (contact angle exceeds 150°), slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces (SLIPS) that possess self-cleaning properties are actively studied (Wong et al 2011). This remarkable property can work, e. g., inside the package, providing a more efficient or complete removal of the product (Mukherjee et al 2018). In case of slippery lubricant-infused surfaces, a drop of liquid does not stick to the object, but is sliding on the surface even at a slight inclination, removing contaminations (Lafuma andQuéré 2011, Wooh andButt 2017).…”

“…SLIPS can be described as solid-liquid systems, consisting of a nanotextured substrate and a lubricant distributed in its structure. Lubricants generally include ionic liquids (Anand et al 2012), vegetable or synthetic oils, such as silicone oil, perfluorinated oil, cottonseed (Mukherjee et al 2018) olive or coconut oils (Manna and Lynn 2015). A variety of materials can be utilized as a substrate, including polymer mem-branes, silicon films, fabrics (Shillingford et al 2014), metals (Kim et al 2012, Wilson et al 2013 and even paper (Glavan et al 2014).…”