Plasma-jet-assisted maskless, erasable, extreme wetting-contrast patterning on stretchable carbon nanotubes film

Abstract

We present a mask-free approach to fabricate patterned surfaces with extreme wetting-contrast on carbon nanotubes/polydimethylsiloxane films using atmospheric micro-plasma jet, merely through exploiting surface hierarchical roughness for superhydrophobic background and oxygenic functional groups for superhydrophilic patches in sequence. Such high-contrast wetting behavior can be fast erased upon low-temperature thermal annealing and recovered by direct plasma jet writing in atmosphere for five cycles. The superwettable patterns also exhibit rather excellent mechanical stability against tensile strain up to 100% and 1000 cyclic stretching under 50% strain. These appealing features endow their versatile potential in liquid manipulation and self-assembly applications towards flexible/stretchable device.