Fabrication of durable hierarchical superhydrophobic fabrics with Sichuan pepper-like structures via graft precipitation polymerization

Abstract

The lotus-inspired hierarchical structure is considered to be the most useful physical structure for constructing excellent superhydrophobic surfaces. Here we created a new strategy to fabricate hierarchical superhydrophobic surface with Sichuan pepper-like structures on polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fabrics through two adjustable precipitation polymerizations. First, covalently bonded micro-scale structures can be constructed on the PET fabrics via direct fluorination-initiated graft precipitation polymerization, followed by the coating of diameter-controllable nanoparticles obtained from free precipitation polymerization with polydimethylsiloxane as a polarity matched adhesive. As a result, a hierarchical suprhydrophobic surface resembling the structure of Sichuan pepper is obtained with water contact angle and shedding angle of 163.4° and 4.0°, respectively. More importantly, fabrics with Sichuan pepper-like structures exhibit excellent self-cleaning in air and oil conditions, anti-icing performance, self-healing ability against O2 plasma etching and outstanding durability that can endure 20 laundering cycles and 50 abrasion cycles.