Abstract
Superhydrophobic surface, as a promising micro/nano material, has tremendous applications in biological and artificial investigations. The electrohydrodynamics (EHD) technique is a versatile and effective method for fabricating micro- to nanoscale fibers and particles from a variety of materials. A combination of critical parameters, such as mass fraction, ratio of N, N-Dimethylformamide (DMF) to Tetrahydrofuran (THF), inner diameter of needle, feed rate, receiving distance, applied voltage as well as temperature, during electrospinning process, to determine the morphology of the electrospun membranes, which in turn determines the superhydrophobic property of the membrane. In this study, we applied a recently developed feedback system control (FSC) scheme for rapid identification of the optimal combination of these controllable parameters to fabricate superhydrophobic surface by one-step electrospinning method without any further modification. Within five rounds of experiments by testing totally forty-six data points, FSC scheme successfully identified an optimal parameter combination that generated electrospun membranes with a static water contact angle of 160 degrees or larger. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) imaging indicates that the FSC optimized surface attains unique morphology. The optimized setup introduced here therefore serves as a one-step, straightforward, and economic approach to fabricate superhydrophobic surface with electrospinning approach.
Highlights
Superhydrophobic surface, which is defined as a surface with a static water contact angle (CA) greater than 150◦ and a water sliding angle (SA) smaller than 10◦ [1], has attracted tremendous interests over the past few years
The morphology of membrane observed by Thermal Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscope (FSEM, SIRION-100, FEI, Hillsboro, OR, USA) required an ion coating with gold by a sputter coater for 300 s under vacuum at a current intensity of 15 mA after mounting the sample on metallic studs with double-sided conductive tape
By adjusting the seven parameters that mainly impact the morphology of membrane, we search for an optimal condition quickly via the feedback system control (FSC) platform that could fabricate electrospun membrane with enough roughness to achieve a best performance about superhydrophobic property
Summary
Superhydrophobic surface, which is defined as a surface with a static water contact angle (CA) greater than 150◦ and a water sliding angle (SA) smaller than 10◦ [1], has attracted tremendous interests over the past few years. For its high roughness and low surface energy properties of the PS material itself, the fabricated membrane shows an excellent superhydrophobic property. We will change more than one parameter simultaneously to study the integrate influence of different parameters by algorithm, and to search for an optimal parameter combination quickly to fabricate an excellent superhydrophobic surface by one-step electrospinning without any further modification. The FSC technique [11,12,13,14] focuses on a desired phenotypic output, such as the superhydrophobic property of the fabricated membrane by electrospinning, as in this study, rather than on detailed mechanism hypothesis on factor-factor interactions
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