Development of hydrophobic AISI 1020 steel surfaces through micro-texturing: A numerical study

Abstract

A key surface property controlled by wettability is hydrophobicity, which can be measured using the contact angle of a resting liquid drop. The study of hydrophobic surfaces has drawn a lot of attention. in biomedical fields, self-cleaning, anti-biofouling, and anticorrosion applications for over a decade. Micro/nano texturing is a great surface modification phenomenon to achieve hydrophobicity for low surface energy materials. The current study attempts to mimic the characteristics of naturally occurring superhydrophobic on the AISI 1020 steel, which is hydrophilic in nature. A two-dimensional model with a surface area of 4 mm × 4 mm was considered for the micro-texturing simulation. The simulation of water droplets on the micro-textured solid surface with different geometrical parameters is analyzed using ANSYS Fluent software. Furthermore, the effect of texture width, texture land, and area density was investigated on the contact angle of the surface. A highly hydrophobic surface with a contact angle of 128° was achieved for the micro-texture with a texture width of 50 µm, land of 40 µm, and an area density of 0.45.