Facile fabrication of functional PDMS surfaces with tunable wettablity and high adhesive force via femtosecond laser textured templating

Abstract

Femtosecond laser processing is emerged as a promising tool to functionalize surfaces of various materials, including metals, semiconductors, and polymers. However, the productivity of this technique is limited by the low efficiency of laser raster scanning. Here we report a facile approach for efficiently producing large-area functional polymer surfaces, by which metal is firstly textured by a femtosecond laser, and the as-prepared hierarchical structures are subsequently transferred onto polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) surfaces. Aluminum pieces covered by laser induced micro/nano-structures act as template masters and their performance of displaying diverse colors are investigated. Polymer replicas are endowed with tunable wetting properties, which are mainly attributed to the multi-scale surface structures. Furthermore, the surfaces are found to have extremely high adhesive force for water drops because of the high water penetration depth and the resultant high contact angle hysteresis. This characteristic facilitates many potential applications like loss-free tiny water droplets transportation. The reusability of metal master and easiness of soft lithography make it to be a very simple, fast and cost-efficient way for mass production of functional polymeric surfaces.

Direct Imprinting of Large-Area Metallic Photonic Lattices for Infrared Polarization Filters with Broadband Tunability

“…In the fabrication, a PDMS stamp (blazing grating with the period of 1.7 μm) was used as the mold (SEM shown in Figure S1 ), and the Au nanoparticle colloid was used as the ink. The PDMS stamp was fabricated following the steps in [ 19 ] from a commercial blazed grating mask (GR50-0605, Thorlabs, Newtown, NJ, USA) [ 23 ]. The Au nanoparticle colloid was synthesized using the method described in [ 20 ] and resolved in p-Xylene with a 100 mg/mL concentration.…”