Superhydrophic coating for the use in marine environments
A new paper describes a flexible and transparent superhydrophobic coating on cotton fabrics with high mechanical and chemical stability for underwater insulation.
Achieving both stretchability and excellent transparency of superhydrophobic surfaces simultaneously is a major challenge. Researchers utilised three acrylic monomers 1H,1H,2H,2H-heptadecafluorodecyl acrylate, methyl methacrylate, 3-(trimethoxysilyl) propyl methacrylate to polymerise flexible, transparent, low surface energy random copolymers (PHMK) as the coating. The coating has excellent transparency (90.2 %) and the coated elastic cotton fabric exhibits superhydrophobicity (WCA = 160°) even at the tensile strain of 0–300 %.
Potential application in fields such as life jackets
The water droplets on the surface can bounce repeatedly in a stretched state. The coating has excellent chemical and mechanical stability and maintains superhydrophobicity under various treatments such as in various organic solvents and HCl (pH = 1) immersion, 20 washing cycles, the Martindale abrasion test 1000 times, and the tape peeling test 600 times. In addition, the coated cotton fabric also has excellent underwater thermal insulation performance, which has great potential application in fields such as life jackets.
The study has been published in Progress in Organic Coatings, Volume 185, December 2023.
