Construction of super-hydrophobic PDMS@MOF@Cu mesh for reduced drag, anti-fouling and self-cleaning towards marine vehicle applications

Abstract

• Unique mushroom-like structures were controllable synthesized by bottom-up method. • The superhydrophobic mesh can serve as marine vehicle with high sailing velocity. • The superhydrophobic mesh possessed superior loading capacity and drag resistance. Generally, the elaborate design of hierarchical micro-nano structures always suffers from high cost and complex procedures, such as laser lithography and plasma etching. Herein, we developed a novel strategy to in-situ fabricate mushroom-like structures constructed by nanowhisker-nanowire hierarchical architectures on copper mesh through a more flexible bottom-up method. The final morphology is highly controlled by adjusting corresponding synthetic conditions. The superhydrophobic copper mesh with a static contact angle of 151.8° and a sliding angle of 3.6° possesses superior anti-fouling and self-cleaning performances towards pollution of daily drinks and dirt. In virtue of the introduction of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), the tolerances of superhydrophobic mesh are greatly prolonged more than 24 h in extreme solutions including pH = 1 ~ 14 solutions and 3.5 wt% NaCl solution. Moreover, the superhydrophobic copper mesh presents excellent drag resistance with a high sailing velocity of 25.38 cm s −1 and a large loading capacity (7.34 times) on water. Therefore, the as-prepared mesh exhibits huge potentials for serving as a marine vehicle with a high sailing velocity, which shows satisfying tolerance in extreme environments. It is expected that this research can pave the way to elaborating hierarchical structures on solid surfaces through manageable bottom-up approaches.