Hierarchically nanotextured surfaces maintaining superhydrophobicity under severely adverse conditions

Abstract

Superhydrophobic surfaces are highly desirable for a broad range of technologies and products affecting everyday life. Despite significant progress in recent years in understanding the principles of hydrophobicity, mostly inspired by surface designs found in nature, many man-made surfaces employ readily processable materials, ideal to demonstrate principles, but with little chance of survivability outside a very limited range of well-controlled environments. Here we focus on the rational development of robust, hierarchically nanostructured, environmentally friendly, metal-based (aluminum) superhydrophobic surfaces, which maintain their performance under severely adverse conditions. Based on their functionality, we superpose selected hydrophobic layers (i.e. self-assembled monolayers, thin films, or nanofibrous coatings) on hierarchically textured aluminum surfaces, collectively imparting high level robustness of superhydrophobicity under adverse conditions. These surfaces simultaneously exhibit chemical stability, mechanical durability and droplet impalement resistance. They impressively maintained their superhydrophobicity after exposure to severely adverse chemical environments like strong alkaline (pH ∼ 9–10), acidic (pH ∼ 2–3), and ionic solutions (3.5 weight% of sodium chloride), and could simultaneously resist water droplet impalement up to an impact velocity of 3.2 m s⁻¹ as well as withstand standard mechanical durability tests.