Reduced Blood Coagulation on Roll‐to‐Roll, Shrink‐Induced Superhydrophobic Plastics

Abstract

The unique antiwetting properties of superhydrophobic (SH) surfaces prevent the adhesion of water and bodily fluids, including blood, urine, and saliva. While typical manufacturable approaches to create SH surfaces rely on chemical and structural modifications, such approaches are expensive, require postprocessing, and are often not biocompatible. By contrast, it is demonstrated that purely structural SH features are easily formed using high throughput roll-to-roll (R2R) manufacturing by shrinking a prestressed thermoplastic with a thin, stiff layer of silver and calcium. These features are subsequently embossed into any commercially available and Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved plastic. The R2R SH surfaces have contact angles >150° and contact angle hysteresis <10°. Importantly, the surfaces minimize blood adhesion, leading to reduced blood coagulation without the need for anticoagulants. SH surfaces have >4200× reduction of blood residue area compared to the nonstructured controls of the same material. In addition, blood clotting is reduced >5× using whole blood directly from the patient. Furthermore, these surfaces can be easily configured into 3D shapes, as demonstrated with SH tubes. With the simple scale-up production and the eliminated need for anticoagulants to prevent clotting, the proposed conformable SH surfaces can be impactful for a wide range of medical tools, including catheters and microfluidic channels.

Water and Blood Repellent Flexible Tubes

“…Superhydrophobic tubes reported so far have been produced either by hydrophobic coating of a conventional tube 11 , 39 or by rolling of a superhydrophobic planar surface 6 , 40 , 41 . The coating approach has many challenges; 1: The coating procedure inside a tube can be challenging to optimize for high quality coatings, 2: A coating applied inside a tube is mostly not monolithic so its durability is limited, 3: The coatings are mostly fluorine-based with a possibility of contamination of the liquid and other environmental downsides.…”

Flexible Piezoresistive Pressure Sensor Using Wrinkled Carbon Nanotube Thin Films for Human Physiological Signals

“…As shown in Figure , a CNT thin film was deposited onto a polystyrene (PS) substrate using a spray gun deposition method. PS is a shape memory polymer that is able to shrink (≈67% in area) back to its original shape when induced with an external stimulus such as heat . When the PS was heated pass its glass transition temperature (100 °C), the PS shrunk causing the CNT thin film to buckle and form highly self‐similar wrinkled structures.…”

Multi-scale silica structures for improved HIV-1 Capsid (p24) antigen detection

“…Additionally, the platform is scalable: we have shown the ability to deposit similar thin films through roll-to-roll manufacturing for fabrication of micro- and nanostructures. 27 Therefore, these SiO 2 substrates represent a potentially new and scalable tool for surface sensing applications…”