Wet‐Style Superhydrophobic Antifogging Coatings for Optical Sensors

Abstract

Transparent substrates are widely used for optical applications from lenses for personal and sports eyewear to transparent displays and sensors. While these substrates require excellent optical properties, they often suffer from a variety of environmental challenges such as excessive fogging and surface contamination. In this work, it is demonstrated that a wet‐style superhydrophobic coating, which simultaneously exhibits antifogging, antireflective, and self‐cleaning properties, can be prepared by pattern transferring low‐surface‐energy microstructures onto a heterostructured nanoscale thin film comprising polymers and silica nanoparticles. The polymer–silica nanocomposite base layer serves as a hydrophilic reservoir, guiding the water molecules to preferentially condense into this underlying region and suppress reflection, while the low‐surface‐energy microstructure enables contaminants adsorbed on the surface to be easily removed by rinsing with water.

Low surface energy self‐polishing polymer grafted MWNTs for antibacterial coating and controlled‐release property of Cu2O

“…The antibacterial effect of MWNTs was discovered in 2007 29 . The relevant research believed that the bactericidal mechanism could be divided cell membrane damage 30 (physical puncture) and oxidative stress 31 .…”

“…The antibacterial effect of MWNTs was discovered in 2007. 29 The relevant research believed that the bactericidal mechanism could be divided cell membrane damage 30 (physical puncture) and oxidative stress. 31 cell membrane damage (Figure 7) could be determinated that the bacteria cell morphology would be distorted to cause the impaired integrity of the cell membrane when contacted with MWNTs.…”

Recent Progress in the Fabrication and Characteristics of Self‐Repairing Superhydrophobic Surfaces

“…Superhydrophobic surface offer outstanding self-cleaning, [1][2][3][4][5] antifog, [6][7][8] anti-icing, [9,10] anticorrosion, [11,12] and oil-water separation [13][14][15] properties and are used in a wide variety of applications. Strategies for the fabrication of superhydrophobic surfaces include etching, [16][17][18] template techniques, [19][20][21] sol-gel processing, [22,23] chemical vapor deposition (CVD), [24,25] electrostatic spinning, [26][27][28][29] spraying, [30,31] and self-assembly.…”

Parametric scheme for rapid nanopattern replication via electrohydrodynamic instability

“…Various fabrication techniques have been extensively studied for decades, [1][2][3][4][5][6] aimed at producing nely structured surfaces for a wide range of applications, such as memory devices, 6,7 micro-/ nanouidic devices, 8,9 optical devices, 10 sensors, 11,12 and diverse functional coatings. 13,14 Among them, instability of uidic thin lm can be regarded as a viable alternative to conventional topdown approaches, due to scalability, cost-effectiveness, and versatility. 15 As one example, without any expensive equipment or meticulous procedure, surface instability engendered by van der Waals interactions leads to the morphological evolution from an initially at feature to an array of holes or droplet shape to reduce the excessive free energy of the system.…”