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Abstract
The motivation of this work is to create luminescent rare earth/polymer films with outstanding water-resistance and superhydrophobicity. Specifically, the emulsion polymerization of styrene leads to core particles. Then core-shell-structured polymer nanoparticles are synthesized by copolymerization of styrene and acrylic acid on the core surface. The coordination reaction between carboxylic groups and rare earth ions (Eu3+ and Tb3+) generates uniform spherical rare earth/polymer nanoparticles, which are subsequently complexed with PTFE microparticles to obtain micro-/nano-scaled PTFE/rare earth films with hierarchical rough morphology. The films exhibit large water contact angle up to 161° and sliding angle of about 6°, and can emit strong red and green fluorescence under UV excitation. More surprisingly, it is found that the films maintain high fluorescence intensity after submersed in water and even in aqueous salt solution for two days because of the excellent water repellent ability of surfaces.
Highlights
Artificial superhydrophobic materials with water contact angles over 150° and water droplets rolling off the solid surface[1,2,3,4,5,6,7] has attracted growing interest since it brings about unprecedented properties to inorganic and organic polymer materials such as self-cleaning[8,9], anti-icing[10] and anti-bacterial[11], etc
The carboxylic groups provide sites to coordinate with various rare earth ions to produce core-shell-structured rare earth polymeric nanospheres, which were utilized to complex with PTFE microparticles in ethanol to obtain latexes
The first step involves the preparation of core-shell-structured polymer nanospheres using polystyrene (PS) as core and polystyrene-co-poly(acrylic acid) (PS-co-PAA) as shell through emulsion step-polymerization technique
Summary
The reason is that the rare earth-coordinated Nano-Eu3+ film is hydrophilic so that the capillary effect due to the packing of spherical Nano-Eu3+ particles induces the water droplet to seep from the film surface into the interior, resulting in the extremely low contact angle[42]. The superhydrophobic characteristic of the complex film could be attributed to two reasons: first, the film constructed with PTFE microparticles and Nano-Eu3+ nanoparticles has a multi-scaled roughness as revealed by the FE-SEM; second, the low-surface-energy PTFE particles (18.5 mN/m)[43] effectively inhibit the penetration of water into the interior of the film. Superhydrophobic luminescent films with excellent water-resistance to water or aqueous salt solution were successfully prepared from rare earth-coordinated polymer nanoparticles and PTFE microparticles. It is observed that the superhydrophobic rare earth polymer films can maintain high fluorescence stability when submersed in water or aqueous salt solution for two days. The combination of superhydrophobic and fluorescence properties as well as excellent fluorescence stability in aqueous environment is expect to greatly promote the applications of rare earth polymer composite materials in medical diagnosis, fluorescent probe, luminescent labels and many other fields
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