Design of Fluoro-Free Surfaces Super-Repellent to Low-Surface-Tension Liquids

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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

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en

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Advanced Materials, Volume 35, issue 29

Abstract

Super-liquid-repellent surfaces feature high liquid contact angles and low sliding angles find key applications in anti-fouling and self-cleaning. While repellency for water is easily achieved with hydrocarbon functionalities, repellency for many low-surface-tension liquids (down to 30 mN m−1) still requires perfluoroalkyls (a persistent environmental pollutant and bioaccumulation hazard). Here, the scalable room-temperature synthesis of stochastic nanoparticle surfaces with fluoro-free moieties is investigated. Silicone (dimethyl and monomethyl) and hydrocarbon surface chemistries are benchmarked against perfluoroalkyls, assessed using model low-surface-tension liquids (ethanol–water mixtures). It is discovered that both hydrocarbon- and dimethyl-silicone-based functionalization can achieve super-liquid-repellency down to 40–41 mN m−1 and 32–33 mN m−1, respectively (vs 27–32 mN m−1 for perfluoroalkyls). The dimethyl silicone variant demonstrates superior fluoro-free liquid repellency likely due to its denser dimethyl molecular configuration. It is shown that perfluoroalkyls are not necessary for many real-world scenarios requiring super-liquid-repellency. Effective super-repellency of different surface chemistries against different liquids can be adequately predicted using empirically verified phase diagrams. These findings encourage a liquid-centric design, i.e., tailoring surfaces for target liquid properties. Herein, key guidelines are provided for achieving functional yet sustainably designed super-liquid-repellency.

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Funding Information: This work had been supported by the European Union's HORIZON research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska‐Curie grant agreement No. 101062409 and the Academy of Finland grant agreement No. 13347247 (W.S.Y.W). The authors acknowledge support by the Tandem Industry Academia funding from the Finnish Research Impact Foundation project No. 239 (R.H.A.R. and M.S.K.). This work was also supported by the Academy of Finland (Center of Excellence Program (2022‐2029)) in Life‐Inspired Hybrid Materials (LIBER) project number 346109 and Academy of Finland Project number 342169 (R.H.A.R.). The authors also acknowledge the provision of facilities and technical support by Aalto University at the OtaNano Nanomicroscopy Center. The authors thank K. Liu, X. Tian, S. Lepikko, M. Rodriguez‐Valverde, D. Vollmer, A. Naga, H. Kusumaatmaja, L. Hauer, A. Marmur, and V. Craig for the inspiring discussions. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 The Authors. Advanced Materials published by Wiley-VCH GmbH. | openaire: EC/HE/101062409/EU//SuperElectro

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Wong, W S Y, Kiseleva, M S, Zhou, S, Junaid, M, Pitkänen, L & Ras, R H A 2023, 'Design of Fluoro-Free Surfaces Super-Repellent to Low-Surface-Tension Liquids', Advanced Materials, vol. 35, no. 29, 2300306 . https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202300306