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

Abstract

In this paper, we present a facile low-temperature and low-cost water-dissolved filler process for fabricating super-hydrophobic surfaces on acrylic. The fillers are salt grains which are pressed into acrylic by pressure and moisturized by solvent first. Then they are dissolved in water by rinsing to create micro-scale structures on the acrylic surface. The process uses no costly equipment, and is capable of making large surfaces, whereas salt grains can be recycled after rinsing by heating. Most of the fabricated surfaces without any coating have contact angles >150° but slide angle larger than 10°. After coating with PDMS gas at 60 °C, all the fabricated surfaces become super-hydrophobic with slide angles <10°. That is, the present method can turn the originally weakly hydrophobic acrylic surface into super-hydrophobic by coating with PDMS gas by a low-cost process.