Hydrophobic materials capable of withstanding harsh conditions are required for various applications. Here, we show that oxides and nitrides of various low-electronegativity metals are hydrophobic hard ceramics. We attribute their hydrophobicity to low Lewis acidity of the low-electronegativity cations implying a low ability of the cations on the surface to form coordinate bonds with water oxygen anions. Furthermore, we observe a systematically stronger hydrophobic behavior of nitrides compared with the corresponding oxides, which we attribute to nitrogen being a poorer Lewis base than oxygen due to a reduced number of lone pairs of electrons, implying a lower ability of nitrogen anions on the surface to form hydrogen bonds with water hydrogen cations. Most of the oxides and nitrides investigated exhibit high values of hardness. Therefore, oxides and nitrides of low-electronegativity metals should find application as hydrophobic materials in harsh conditions.

We show here that intrinsic hydrophobicity of HfO2 thin films can be easily tuned by the variation of film thickness. We used the reactive high-power impulse magnetron sputtering for preparation of high-quality HfO2 films with smooth topography and well-controlled thickness. Results show a strong dependence of wetting properties on the thickness of the film in the range of 50–250 nm due to the dominance of the electrostatic Lifshitz-van der Waals component of the surface free energy. We have found the water droplet contact angle ranging from ≈120° for the thickness of 50 nm to ≈100° for the thickness of 2300 nm. At the same time the surface free energy grows from ≈25 mJ/m2 for the thickness of 50 nm to ≈33 mJ/m2 for the thickness of 2300 nm. We propose two explanations for the observed thickness dependence of the wetting properties: influence of the non-dominant texture and/or non-monotonic size dependence of the particle surface energy.

No abstract

Chemical vapor deposition (CVD) diamond is a prospective thin film material for cutting tools applications due to the extreme combination of hardness, chemical inertness, and thermal conductivity. However, the CVD diamond cutting ability of ferrous materials is strongly limited due to its extreme affinity to iron, cobalt, or nickel. The diamond–iron interaction and the diffusion behavior in this system are not well studied and are believed to be similar to the graphite–iron mechanism. In this article, we focus on the medium-temperature working range of 400–800 °C of a CVD diamond–Fe system and show that for these temperatures etching of diamond by Fe is not as strong as is generally accepted. The starting point of the diamond graphitization in contact with iron was found around 400 °C. Our results show that CVD diamond is applicable for the cutting of ferrous materials under medium-temperature conditions.

No abstract