Bioinspired Superhydrophobic Surfaces via Laser-Structuring

Abstract

Bioinspired superhydrophobic surfaces are an artificial functional surface that mainly extracts morphological designs from natural organisms. In both laboratory research and industry, there is a need to develop ways of giving large-area surfaces water repellence. Currently, surface modification methods are subject to many challenging requirements such as a need for chemical-free treatment or high surface roughness. Laser micro-nanofabrications are a potential way of addressing these challenges, as they involve non-contact processing and outstanding patterning ability. This review briefly discusses multiple laser patterning methods, which could be used for surface structuring toward creating superhydrophobic surfaces.

Fundamentals and utilization of solid/ liquid phase boundary interactions on functional surfaces

“…The desired surface roughness can be elaborated via both additive-(bottom-up) and destructive (top-down) techniques. The available bottom-up techniques include spray-coating [49], spin-coating [50], solvent-precipitation [51], film-casting [52], chemical vapor deposition [53], physical deposition [54], electrochemical deposition [55], hydrothermal [56], or templating methods [57], in-situ polymerization [58], or even 3D-printing [59] while top-down approaches utilize chemical- [60] and laser-/plasma-etching [61,62]. Despite top-down techniques in general offer better controllability over surface roughness with higher reproducibility, bottom-up approaches are still more popular as they are cheaper, easier to apply, and offer higher scalability.…”

Bioinspired Topographic Surface Modification of Biomaterials

“…As for topographic modifications, natural surfaces have acquired immense biological topographic features at the micro and nano levels due to their prolonged evolution and adaptation. Bioinspired surfaces mimic such features to assist in improving the properties of artificial surfaces [ 23 , 24 ]. The most important surface attributes that are targeted by current investigations when bioinspired surfaces are used to reduce bacterial adhesion or improve cell attachment are roughness, wettability, surface energy and adhesion.…”

Laser-Induced Fast Assembly of Wettability-Finely-Tunable Superhydrophobic Surfaces for Lossless Droplet Transfer

“…Extensive progress has been achieved in superhydrophobic surface fabrication, but the above-mentioned fabrication usually takes a multistep and time-consuming procedure with low processing efficiency and high cost, impeding their practical applications. Laser microprocessing has proven to be a flexible, fast, and cost-effective approach for generating cross-scale surface microstructures that exhibit controllable surface wettability. − However, laser processing methods vary widely. Some are based on subtractive laser ablation that result in regular surface patterns.…”