Abstract
Durability is a long-standing challenge in designing liquid-repellent surfaces. A high-performance omniphobic surface must robustly repel liquids, while maintaining mechanical/chemical stability. However, liquid repellency and mechanical durability are generally mutually exclusive properties for many omniphobic surfaces—improving one performance inevitably results in decreased performance in another. Here we report well-defined porous membranes for durable omniphobic surfaces inspired by the springtail cuticle. The omniphobicity is shown via an amphiphilic material micro-textured with re-entrant surface morphology; the mechanical durability arises from the interconnected microstructures. The innovative fabrication method—termed microfluidic emulsion templating—is facile, cost-effective, scalable and can precisely engineer the structural topographies. The robust omniphobic surface is expected to open up new avenues for diverse applications due to its mechanical and chemical robustness, transparency, reversible Cassie–Wenzel transition, transferability, flexibility and stretchability.
Highlights
Durability is a long-standing challenge in designing liquid-repellent surfaces
Using the capillary microfluidic devices described in our previous study[28,29,30,31], we first produced highly uniform emulsions where silicone oil droplets were dispensed in a polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) aqueous solution (Supplementary Fig. 1)
In summary, we designed robust omniphobic surfaces with well-defined interconnected micro-cavity structures that were fabricated by a facile and cost-effective microfluidic emulsion templating (MET) method
Summary
Durability is a long-standing challenge in designing liquid-repellent surfaces. A high-performance omniphobic surface must robustly repel liquids, while maintaining mechanical/chemical stability. The arrays of extruded structures[4,6,7,11,12,13,14] are disrupted under external abrasion[15] and can even collapse from the capillary forces for nanoscale structures[16] This greatly restricts practical applications of liquid-repellent surfaces. New structural designs are needed to mutually optimize the liquid repellency and mechanical durability, as well as transparency, transferability and stretchability. Inspired by the springtail cuticle, we describe omniphobic surfaces combining excellent liquid repellency and remarkable durability using a bottom-up microfluidic emulsion templating (MET) technique. The resulting porous membranes have interconnected solid structures and uniform honeycomb-like micro-cavities with narrow openings that satisfy the re-entrant profiles. The solid/liquid contact area is precisely controlled via the membrane pore size This textured surface exhibits optimal stability in the non-wetting state. This paves the way for new applications with high commercialization potential
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