Abstract
Fabrics with moisture management properties are strongly expected to benefit various potential applications in daily life, industry, medical treatment and protection. Here, a bifacial fabric with dual trans-planar and in-plane liquid moisture management properties was reported. This novel fabric was fabricated to have a knitted structure on one face and a woven structure on the other, contributing to the different in-plane water transfer properties of the fabric. A facile three-step plasma treatment was used to enrich the bifacial fabric with asymmetric wettability and liquid absorbency. The plasma treated bifacial fabric allowed forced water to transfer from the hydrophobic face to hydrophilic face, while it prevented water to spread through the hydrophobic face when water drops were placed on the hydrophilic face. This confirmed one-way water transport capacity of the bifacial fabric. Through the three-step plasma treatment, the fabric surface was coated with a Si-containing thin film. This film contributed to the hydrophobic property, while the physical properties of the fabrics such as stiffness and color were not affected. This novel fabric can potentially be used to design and manufacture functional and smart textiles with tunable moisture transport properties.
Highlights
The biomimetic water transport property of materials has attracted great attention recently [1].Examples may include the water harvesting materials and microfluidic devices inspired by Stenocara beetle [2], spider silk [3] and cactus [4,5,6]
The surface morphology of the coated and uncoated face of fabrics was observed by environment scanning electron microscopy (SEM, Quanta-250, FEI, Brno, Czech) operated at 5 kV accelerating voltage
The contact angle of the coated face has little increase when the coating time is longer than time of of uncoated face increases dramatically, which maymay due than33min, min,while whilewater waterabsorption absorption time uncoated face increases dramatically, which to permeation of the HMDSO polymerization
Summary
The biomimetic water transport property of materials has attracted great attention recently [1]. Fabric with asymmetric wettability by surface modification showed directional water transfer effect In this case, the micro-processing techniques used for producing rough surface, such as plasma etching [14,15,16], and chemical treatment with fluoro-containing monomer or silicon polymers for reducing the surface free energy [17,18,19], as well as other methods, such as sol-gel process [20,21], electrospinning [22,23], self-assembly [24] and spray coating [25], were used to create a hydrophobic surface in textile fabrics, forming water pressure differentials between two surfaces of the fabric. Studies of the surface chemistry and morphology as well as the stiffness and color of the treated fabrics were conducted to analyze the mechanism and characteristics of the water management ability of the bifacial fabric
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