Abstract
Recently, superhydrophobic surfaces with self-cleaning ability have attracted broad research interest due to their huge potential in daily lives and industrial applications, but the use of fluorinate, toxic organic compounds, and expensive feedstocks make superhydrophobic materials a great challenge in practical application. In this study, we present a facile dip-coating strategy to prepare superhydrophobic coatings with self-cleaning properties based on a non-fluorine and non-toxic system by using eco-friendly corn straw as raw material. During this process, aromatic carbon particles with rough hierarchical structures were prepared firstly via a simple fast pyrolysis process, followed by modification with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) in absolute ethanol solvent to decrease the surface free energy. Research shows these natural straw-derived carbons display a microstructure of several protrusions which is similar to the lotus leave’s and the resulted coatings exhibit an outstanding superhydrophobic property with a static water contact angle (WCA) of 151.67 ± 1.36 degrees. In addition, the as-prepared coatings possessed excellent self-cleaning performance: no contaminations were observed on the surfaces after examining with sludge, calcimine, water, and common liquids such as tea, milk, soybean milk as well as ink, which have a broad range of potential application in the field of antifouling, waterproofing, and anticorrosive.
Highlights
In recent years, with environmental pollution intensifies, there are increasingly suspended particles and dust in the air, which leads to the increasing possibility for the surfaces exposed to the ambient atmosphere such as ships, automobile windshields, external wall and glass of high-rise buildings, windmill’s sails, etc. to be contaminated, which results in increasing cleaning cost but the difficulty to clean [1,2,3,4]
Superhydrophobic materials surfaces are defined as a surface that displays a water contact angle greater than 150◦ along with roll-off angles less than 10◦ [5]
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Summary
With environmental pollution intensifies, there are increasingly suspended particles and dust in the air, which leads to the increasing possibility for the surfaces exposed to the ambient atmosphere such as ships, automobile windshields, external wall and glass of high-rise buildings, windmill’s sails, etc. to be contaminated, which results in increasing cleaning cost but the difficulty to clean [1,2,3,4]. With tremendous efforts devoted to the superwettability mechanism of organisms in nature including water striders legs [8], butterfly wings [9], rose and sunflower petals [10], lotus plant leaves [11], gecko foot [12], etc., a wide range of methods and techniques have been developed to texture hierarchical micro/nanosized structures which can be divided into two design strategies: one is fabricated from larger-scale materials and the another is manufactured from atomic or molecular scale materials [13] In more detail, these methods and techniques involve lithography [14], diamond cutting [15], etching [16], 3D printing [17], layer-by-layer assembly [18], selfassembly [19], sol-gel [20], and others
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