The control of ubiquitous wetting behavior that is determined by the surface free energy of the solid and the surface tension of the interacting liquid is an area of intense research, largely due to its applications in various sectors, ranging from healthcare to automotive industry.
The failure and/or toxic nature of the conventionally employed chemical methods to engineer the surface free energy of solids paved the way for utilizing alternative techniques such as laser-based physical texturing of the surface to achieve the desired wettability behavior. This review provides
insight into the implementation of lasers to engineer the surfaces of various kinds of materials and how the surface engineering manipulates their wetting characteristics based on the state of the art knowledge of the field. Various theories that explain the wetting behavior of droplets on
the surfaces of homogeneous, heterogeneous, and complex structures are discussed with a special emphasis on the role of surface roughness. Further, the article focuses on the lasermatter interaction at different time scales and modification of the surfaces with different kinds of lasers (nano,
pico, and femtosecond laser) and their applications. A critical analysis of the effects of experimental parameters such as laser fluence, repetition rate, laser wavelength, inter-pattern spacing on the experimentally observed wetting behavior in the recent literature is also presented. Emerging
applications of laser structured surfaces in various fields, including biomedical, water harvesting, anti-bacterial, spectroscopic analysis, oil/water separation, etc. are discussed in detail.
Wettability-tailored tracks are emerging as an efficient approach to collecting and transporting underwater air bubbles as well as water from the mist. However, tailoring the surface wettability by modifying the surface structural features via physiochemical methods to create superhydrophilic−superhydrophobic contrast tracks suffers from long-term durability issues, while the emerging liquid-infused slippery surface has inherent design engineering limitations and issues from infused oil depletion. Herein, we demonstrate that by selective silicone oil grafting onto the glass substrate, it is possible to create a wettability contrast of ∼ 43°. Further, we illustrate the application of such tracks for underwater air bubble capturing and transportation in an aqueous medium with surface tension ranging from 72 to 43.5 mN/m. In addition, the potential of these nonadhesive and adhesive tracks for water collection from the mist is shown and the critical effect of the track dimension and intertrack spacing on the water harvesting rate is investigated in detail. The study illustrates that the nonadhesive nature of the oil-grafted region enables the easy transport of underwater air bubbles as well as water from the flow medium and thus offers an easy and facile approach to creating substrates for underwater air bubble collection and water harvesting.
Droplet splitting by exploiting the tailored surface wettability is emerging as an important pathway to create the ultralow volume of samples that can find applications in bioassays, tissue engineering, protein...
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