A low-cost filler (salt) water-dissolved method is developed to produce large-area and flexible super-hydrophobic surfaces by using poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) material. Five levels of salt grain sizes are used to examine the filler size effect on fabricating the super-hydrophobic surfaces and on the hydrophobic mechanism involved. The results show that the surfaces fabricated using grain sizes of 53-74 and 74-104 μm exhibit the lotus effect (cell adhesion (CA) > 150 • and self-adhesion (SA) < 10 • ); whereas those using grain sizes of 0-25 μm and above 104 μm reveal the petal effect (CA > 150 • and high adhesion even upside-down). The super-hydrophobic characteristic is achieved mainly by the large micro rib-like structures, small micro rock-like bumps, and textures on the bump due to the fillers.
The self-cleaning effect of super-hydrophobic surfaces has attracted the attention of researchers. Typical ways of manufacturing super-hydrophobic surfaces include the use of either dedicated equipment or a complex chemical process. In this study, a simple innovative filler-dissolved method is developed using mainly powder salt and rinsing to form hydrophobic surfaces. This method can produce large super-hydrophobic surfaces with porous and micro rib surface structures. It can also be applied to curved surfaces, including flexible membranes. The contact angle of the manufactured artificial hydrophobic surface is about 160°. Furthermore, water droplets roll off the surface readily at a sliding angle of less than 5°, resembling the nonwetting lotus like effect.
In this paper, we present a facile low-temperature and low-cost water-dissolved filler process for fabricating super-hydrophobic surfaces on acrylic. The fillers are salt grains which are pressed into acrylic by pressure and moisturized by solvent first. Then they are dissolved in water by rinsing to create micro-scale structures on the acrylic surface. The process uses no costly equipment, and is capable of making large surfaces, whereas salt grains can be recycled after rinsing by heating. Most of the fabricated surfaces without any coating have contact angles[150°but slide angle larger than 10°. After coating with PDMS gas at 60°C, all the fabricated surfaces become super-hydrophobic with slide angles \10°. That is, the present method can turn the originally weakly hydrophobic acrylic surface into super-hydrophobic by coating with PDMS gas by a low-cost process.
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