Fabricating Super-hydrophobic Polydimethylsiloxane Surfaces by a Simple Filler-Dissolved Process

Abstract

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.

A facile low-temperature and low-cost process for fabricating super-hydrophobic surface on acrylic

“…In contrast, we have been concentrated on developing lower cost and simpler methods. Therefore, we extend our water-dissolved filler method [34,35] to fabricate superhydrophobic surfaces on PMMA. Our main objectives are threefolds: reducing the involved harmful chemicals, reducing the process time in mass production, and using weakly hydrophobic rather than hydrophobic materials to widen the material availability.…”

A low-cost filler-dissolved process for fabricating super-hydrophobic poly(dimethylsiloxane) surfaces with either lotus or petal effect

“…To mimic the super-hydrophobic surfaces in nature, man-made ones commonly use hydrophobic groups (-CF3) to replace wax because of their low surface energy and the availability of various fabrication methods [15][16][17]. Methods include soft-lithographic imprinting [18], plasma etching or deposition [19], the sol-gel approach [20], template synthesis [21][22][23][24], solution methods [25][26][27], selfassembled monolayer coating (SAM) [28], etc. They typically require dedicated equipment, complex chemical processes or replica molding from leaves with polymers [29].…”