New progress in tunable adhesion on material surface was made by the Research Group of Surface and Interface Behavior of Engineering Materials of the Sate Key Laboratory of Solid Lubrication, Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In recent years, much work has been devoted to hydrophobic/oleophobic materials.However, as one important physical property of material surface, the adhesion hasn’t been paid sufficient attention.In particular, how to tune the surface adhesion on material surface is rarely reported.Using polymeric materials, superhydrophobic/superoleophobic materials with complex micro/nanoscale binary structures and depth profiles were successfully prepared.Through varying the content of hydrophilic components in the hydrophobic coating, the adhesion of water droplets on the surface was readily tuned. Recently, the fast reversible switching between adhesion and sliding on the surface was realized on anodized well-aligned TiO2 NT films using masked UV irradiation and heat treatment. The proof-of-concept application of the results in the protection of arranged superhydrophobic regions and controllable transportation of water droplets/fluid was also investigated.The facile approach may have significant application in the no lost transportation of microfluidics, sealing protection and other engineering areas.The work can also be taken as model surfaces for the research on protein adsorption and is potentially significant for better understanding the proliferation of cells and fouling of marine biospecies.
The work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China and National Basic Research Program of China. The related work was published in Soft Matter（Soft Matter, 2009, 5, 3097–3105）and Chemical Communication（Chem. Comm. 2009, DOI: 10.1039/b914630j）.
