Super hydrophobic polymer surfaces

The lotus-like and honeycomb-like aligned CNT films with a combination of micro- and nanostructures were also reported (Sun et al., 2003 Choi et al., 2003). They all displayed super-hydrophobic properties as shown in Fig. 9.14. The well-aligned CNT-polymer films or coatings have potential on applications such as super-hydrophobic surfaces to textiles, coatings, gene delivery, micro-fluid channels, non-wetting liquid transfer, and so forth. 

Some recent examples including uses as super hydrophobic surfaces [142], medical composites of spun fibers, generating scaffolds for cell attachment [138], thermoplastic elastomers [139], as a supramolecular electrolyte in a dye-sensitized solar cell [190], as a method to align polymer chains [191], or as supramolecular polymer composites [192] have been discussed previously. Still there is ample space to be explored and there definitely will be many more patents and applications in this field. 

Nano-clay incorporated polymer coatings are important for modifying properties of surfaces. Nano-clay incorporated thermoset polymer nanocoatings exhibit superior properties such as super-hydrophobicity, improved wettability, excellent resistance to chemicals, corrosion resistance, improved weather resistance, better abrasion resistance, improved barrier properties and resistance to impact, scratches, etc. [116]. The parameters such as dipping time, temperature, nature of surfactant, and purity of nanomaterials decides the coating thickness. Clay-epoxy coating... 

While Teflon is a polymer that is particularly difficult to wet with a low critical surface tension, as we see in this problem, other fluoro-materials such as perfluoro-acid surfaces are equally or even harder to wet as they have very low values of the critical surface tension. This can be seen in Figure 6.3. Thus these materials ean form the basis of super-hydrophobic and potential self-cleaning surfaces, graphically illustrated in Figure 6.4. 

Peng, C.W., Chang, K.C., Weng, C.J., et al. UV-curable nanocasting technique to prepare bio-mimetic super-hydrophobic non-fluorinated polymeric surfaces for advanced anticorrosive coatings. Polym. Chem. 4, 926-932 (2013)... 

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