Zhan Zhibing, Garcell Erik M, Guo Chunlei
The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NewYork 14627 United States of America's Republic of China.
These authors contributed equally to this work.
Mater Res Express. 2019;6(7):075011. doi: 10.1088/2053-1591/ab10c6. Epub 2019 Apr 5.
Superhydrophobic surfaces rely on a large number of surface micro/nano structures to increase the roughness of a material. Producing such structures is possible through a multitude of relatively slow methods; however, economic and large scale production of superhydrophobic surfaces require using a fast process on a cheap substrate. Here, we used femtosecond laser processing to fabricate micro and nanostructures on tungsten carbide that we use as a mold to thermally imprint polypropylene sheets. The fabricated tungsten carbide mold was used to imprint more than twenty superhydrophobic polypropylene sheets before mold contamination reduces the surface contact angle below 150°.Using Toluene solution, the mold is subsequently capable of being cleaned of contamination from polypropylene residue and reused for further imprinting. Ninety thermoplastic imprints were conducted using a single tungsten carbide mold with only minimal structural degradation apparent on the micro/nano structured surface.
超疏水表面依靠大量的表面微/纳米结构来增加材料的粗糙度。通过多种相对较慢的方法可以制造出这样的结构；然而，超疏水表面的经济大规模生产需要在廉价基板上使用快速工艺。在这里，我们使用飞秒激光加工在碳化钨上制造微结构和纳米结构，然后将其用作模具对聚丙烯片材进行热压印。在模具污染使表面接触角降至150°以下之前，制造的碳化钨模具用于压印二十多张超疏水聚丙烯片材。随后，使用甲苯溶液能够清除模具上聚丙烯残留物的污染，并可重新用于进一步压印。使用单个碳化钨模具进行了90次热塑性压印，在微/纳米结构表面仅观察到最小程度的结构退化。
