Lubricant-infused Nanoparticulate Coatings Assembled by Layer-by-layer Deposition

Citation:

Sunny S, Vogel N, Howell C, Vu TL, Aizenberg J. Lubricant-infused Nanoparticulate Coatings Assembled by Layer-by-layer Deposition. Adv. Funct. Mater. 2014;24 (42) :6658-6667.

Abstract:

Omniphobic coatings are designed to repel a wide range of liquids without leaving stains on the surface. A practical coating should exhibit stable repel- lency, show no interference with color or transparency of the underlying substrate and, ideally, be deposited in a simple process on arbitrarily shaped surfaces. We use layer-by-layer (LbL) deposition of negatively charged silica nanoparticles and positively charged polyelectrolytes to create nanoscale sur- face structures that are further surface-functionalized with fluorinated silanes and infiltrated with fluorinated oil, forming a smooth, highly repellent coating on surfaces of different materials and shapes. We show that four or more
LbL cycles introduce sufficient surface roughness to effectively immobilize the lubricant into the nanoporous coating and provide a stable liquid inter- face that repels water, low-surface-tension liquids and complex fluids. The absence of hierarchical structures and the small size of the silica nanoparti- cles enables complete transparency of the coating, with light transmittance exceeding that of normal glass. The coating is mechanically robust, maintains its repellency after exposure to continuous flow for several days and prevents adsorption of streptavidin as a model protein. The LbL process is conceptu- ally simple, of low cost, environmentally benign, scalable, automatable and therefore may present an efficient synthetic route to non-fouling materials.

Notes:

N.V. acknowledges support from the Leopoldina Fellowship Programme. S.S. acknowledges support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The work was supported by the ARPA-E under award number DE-AR0000326 (fabrication and surface properties) and by the AFOSR under award number FA9550–09–0669-DOD35CAP (optical properties). This work was performed in part at the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems (CNS) supported by the NSF under award number ECS-0335765.

Last updated on 05/04/2018