Manufacture of porous metallic glass using dissolvable templates

Abstract

A facile, precise, and controllable manufacturing technology is desired for hierarchical functional surfaces. In this work, we successfully manufactured porous metallic glass using a water-dissolution material as template and the excellent thermoplastic property of metallic glass. The prepared micro/nanostructures have excellent tunability, and the proposed approach can be used to prepare large-area disordered porous structures and ordered regular arrays with nanoscale replication accuracy. In particular, the disordered porous structure prepared by the dissolvable template strategy exhibits a water contact angle of ∼140° and an oil contact angle of ∼0°, making it suitable for oil/water separation. It also shows stable wettability after being soaked in strong acid or alkali environments and maintains a ∼130° water contact angle and a ∼4° oil contact angle even after severe wear. The proposed strategy also possesses excellent recycling properties. We reconstructed porous structures on the same surface three times and found no significant change in wettability for each reconstructed porous structure. Our research provides a facile and controllable approach for the preparation of hierarchical porous structures and paves the way for the design of other functional surfaces.