Ultra-thin self-healing vitrimer coatings for durable hydrophobicity

Abstract

Durable hydrophobic materials have attracted considerable interest in the last century. Currently, the most popular strategy to achieve hydrophobic coating durability is through the combination of a perfluoro-compound with a mechanically robust matrix to form a composite for coating protection. The matrix structure is typically large (thicker than 10 μm), difficult to scale to arbitrary materials, and incompatible with applications requiring nanoscale thickness such as heat transfer, water harvesting, and desalination. Here, we demonstrate durable hydrophobicity and superhydrophobicity with nanoscale-thick, perfluorinated compound-free polydimethylsiloxane vitrimers that are self-healing due to the exchange of network strands. The polydimethylsiloxane vitrimer thin film maintains excellent hydrophobicity and optical transparency after scratching, cutting, and indenting. We show that the polydimethylsiloxane vitrimer thin film can be deposited through scalable dip-coating on a variety of substrates. In contrast to previous work achieving thick durable hydrophobic coatings by passively stacking protective structures, this work presents a pathway to achieving ultra-thin (thinner than 100 nm) durable hydrophobic films.

Research progress on eco-friendly superhydrophobic materials in environment, energy and biology

“…4b). Miljkovic et al 110 cross-linked PDMS with dynamic borate esters to construct a durable self-healing ultra-thin and super-hydrophobic material. Chen et al 111 prepared superhydrophobic thin films on copper wafers via the hydrolysis of vinyl trimethoxysilane (VTES).…”

The apparent surface free energy of rare earth oxides is governed by hydrocarbon adsorption

“…The apparent advancing contact angle increases as hydrocarbon adsorption ensues, denoting the wettability transition better. Studies using solid-vapor interfacial energy measurement also adopt the same approach using the apparent advancing contact angle for the wettability characterization (Ma et al, 2020a(Ma et al, , 2021Zhao et al, 2021).…”

Laser etching-based surface wetting modulation of silicone rubber for triboelectric nanogenerator

“…These attacks will affect its mechanical and electrical properties, including the hardening and brittleness of the silicone rubber surface, and local aging, which lead to cracking and safety accidents such as leakage of electricity and water (Kumosa et al, 2002;Velásquez and Lara, 2018). Superhydrophobic surfaces are surfaces where the contact angle (CA) of water droplets on the object is greater than 150 °and the roll angle (RA) is less than 10 and has great anti-dirt, anti-ice, and self-cleaning properties (Ma et al, 2021). Due to the poor hydrophobic property of silicone rubber itself, it can obtain excellent hydrophobicity by preparing a superhydrophobic layer on the surface of silicone rubber without being invaded by rain, ice, wind and sand, waste liquid, etc.…”