Controllable superhydrophobic surfaces with tunable adhesion fabricated by laser interference lithography

Abstract

Superhydrophobic surfaces with tunable wettability have attracted much attention in recent years, and many techniques have been developed to fabricate artificial function structures. However, applications of tunable adhesive superhydrophobic surfaces have been limited due to ambiguous structural factors on wettability. In this paper, we studied the relationship between the surface adhesion and geometry parameters of periodic submicron structures, and presented a facile approach for the fabrication of controllable superhydrophobic surfaces with tunable adhesion through laser interference lithography (LIL) combined with inductively coupled plasma (ICP) etching. The wettability properties of periodic geometry structures were selected by tailoring the top area ratio of the pillar array. The findings of this work will contribute to quantifying structural parameters on the submicron scale through the combination of three-beam LIL and ICP etching for designing and developing new systems for micro-droplet manipulation. This approach can find potential applications in many fields such as targeted drug delivery, biomolecular quantitative detection, selective liquid transportation and oil/water separation.