Abstract
Coating materials with special surface wettability are widely applied in marine paint systems used in the naval industry to reduce the corrosion and viscous drag of seawater. However, traditional coatings are inefficient and limited, either by poor durability or insufficient anti-drag capacity. Here, inspired by the diving bell spider, a bionic superhydrophobic coating with multiscale hierarchical architecture was successfully prepared on the surface of aluminium alloy. It possesses excellent mechanical abrasion durability, chemical durability, and low adhesion. Remarkably, the water contact angles could remain over 150.9° after more than 15 abrasion cycles or strong acid/alkali conditions. In addition, the impacting water droplet lifted off the surface of bionic superhydrophobic aluminium alloy (BSAA) within 13 ms, illustrating an excellent low adhesion property. In fact, when the BSAA is immersed in water, it could absorb bubbles and form a gas membrane. The existence of the gas membrane could prevent water and anaerobic organisms from contacting and even corroding the BSAA. Meanwhile, the gas membrane acts as a lubricant and significantly deceases friction at the solid–liquid interface, reducing the drag for BSAA. The BSAA proposed in this work has broad application prospects, such as medical devices, microfluidic chips, gas separation and collection in water.
Highlights
In the past few decades, to maximize the energy efficiency, and minimize the drag losses in fluid transport in pipelines, scientists have made gigantic efforts to develop strategies to reduce the corrosion and viscous drag of seawater [1,2,3], which accounts for a relatively high proportion of the total dissipation of well-designed underwater vehicles
When the contact angle is greater than 150◦ and the sliding angle (SA) is less than 10◦, water droplets could maintain a spherical shape on the solid surface, which is called a superhydrophobic surface [9,10,11,12]
Considering the above-mentioned challenges, the water-repellent function should be achieved by a structural design to replace traditional superhydrophobic paint [22,23,24,25], enhance the physicochemical strength, and further synergistically improve the anti-drag performance of superhydrophobic coating materials, which is in line with the developmental tendencies of superhydrophobic coating materials [26,27,28,29]
Summary
In the past few decades, to maximize the energy efficiency (like increasing the traveling speed and distance of underwater naval vehicles), and minimize the drag losses in fluid transport in pipelines, scientists have made gigantic efforts to develop strategies to reduce the corrosion and viscous drag of seawater [1,2,3], which accounts for a relatively high proportion of the total dissipation of well-designed underwater vehicles. As we all know, after millions of years of brutal evolution, creatures in nature have evolved diversified micro/nanostructures to realize a great number of optimized functions for adapting to varied environmental changes [34,35,36,37] These biological materials with functional integration provide an enormous source of inspiration for the development of biomimetic materials [38,39]. Inspired by the multiscale hierarchical structure of the diving bell spider, a bionic superhydrophobic aluminium alloy (BSAA) with excellent mechanical abrasion durability, superior chemical durability, and low adhesion properties was prepared using the method of combing the spray coating and laser corrosion. The investigations in this work offer a promising way to handily design and fabricate quasi-textured surfaces with multiscale hierarchical structures that possess excellent durability and superior water-repellent capacity
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