Recent Advances in the Methods for Designing Superhydrophobic Surfaces

Abstract

The investigations of superhydrophobicity and self-cleaning surfaces have been given a lot of attention in the last few decades. The surfaces having water contact angle larger than ° are termed as hydrophobic surfaces and those which exhibit contact angle higher than ° are said to be superhydrophobic. Such surfaces were first observed in nature in various plants and animals, for example, lotus leaf-like structures. Water repellence of various materials have shown great influences on various applications such as self-cleaning, anti-ageing, water-oil separation, water corrosion in electrical industry, water proof textiles, controlled transportation of fluids, etc. Generally, surface micro/nanostructuring combined with low surface energy of materials leads to extreme anti-wetting properties. The hundreds of research articles and more than patents on the subject of nature mimicking self-cleaning surfaces prove the potential of this topic.

Selective Plasma Etching of Polymeric Substrates for Advanced Applications

“…The self-cleaning ability of materials is expressed in terms of the water contact angle, where the surface with a contact angle above 150° is termed as the superhydrophobic surface [ 67 ]. Plasma etching efficiently creates superhydrophobic surfaces by two major mechanisms: firstly by providing sufficient roughness to the surface by the etching process and secondly by providing a sufficient number of low-energy functional groups [ 68 ]. Typically used fluorine containing plasmas have an ability to simultaneously incorporate sufficient amounts of low-energy functional groups as well as create the desired surface roughness through etching.…”

Effect of Plasma Treatment on the Impact Behavior of Epoxy/Basalt Fiber-Reinforced Composites: A Preliminary Study

“…However, thanks to this type of protocol, the BS_2 and BS_4 systems obtain a thicker skin-deep coating which guarantees higher impact resistance [ 22 , 23 ]. It is worth noting that, in the case of the coated materials, the first significant load drop occurs in correspondence to the maximum load, while in the case of neat BS laminates, several load drops, denoting delamination initiation and propagation, are observed.…”

Fabrication and Characterization of Durable Superhydrophobic and Superoleophobic Surfaces on Stainless Steel Mesh Substrates

“…As the surface tension of the oil used for testing decreases, attaining higher contact angles becomes increasingly challenging. Various 2 techniques, such as electrochemical deposition [10][11], electrospinning method [12][13], wet chemical reaction [14][15] [16], hydrothermal synthesis [17][18] [19], phase separation method [20][21] [22] and chemical vapor deposition [23][24] [25][26] [27] have been employed in prior studies to achieve superhydrophobicity. However, these techniques are often limited by their complexity, the need for expensive equipment, or protracted procedures.…”