Preparation And Wettability Of Superhydrophobic Copper Surface

Bionic superhydrophobic materials have attracted increasingattention due to many potential application fields such as self-cleaning,anti-corrosion and anti-frosting. In the past years, a variety of methodshave been developed to fabricate artificial superhydrophobic surfaces.However, most of them are subjected to some limitation such asexpensive apparatus, complex process, environmentally harmful materials,and so on. In this paper, five methods were developed to fabricatesuperhydrophobic copper surfaces under the simple condition ofexperiment and the surface wettability was studied. The details andinnovative points of this paper are as follows.(1) A novel avenue called template-assisted etching method wasdeveloped to fabricate firstly a regular hierarchical micro/nano structurehighly similar to that of lotus leaf on a copper foil via the combination oftemplate method and etching method. After modified by stearic acid, thisrough surface became superhydrophobic and its water contact angle andsliding angle were about153°and7°, respectively. This study provides anew way to fabricate uniform fine surface micro/nanostructure that ishighly similar to natural biological surfaces on metal materials.(2) Superhydrophobic surfaces with grass-like microstructures wereprepared on copper foil by immersing in stearic acid-95%ethanol solutionand the influence of immersing factors on the surface microstructure andwettability was studied. The experiment results showed that when theconcentration of stearic acid solution, the immersing time and thetemperature were2g/L,120min and40℃re,spectively, the as-preparedcopper surface possessed a great superhydrophobicity with a watercontact angle of up to159°and a sliding angle of only3°.(3) A novel approach called template-adjusted self-assembly methodwas developed to fabricate a lotus-leaf-like superhydrophobic surface oncopper foil via the combination of template method and self-assemblymethod, in which the template adjusted the self-assembled parts on copper surface. The size and distribution of flower-like microstructureson the as-prepared copper surface were highly similar to papillae of lotusleaf; but the nanostructure on the microstructure was very different fromthat of papille. The water contact angle of this superhydrophobic coppersurface was up to161°and its sliding angle was less than3°.(4) A new method was developed to obtain a great superhydrophobicsurface on copper foil via depositing a candle soot coating. Its watercontact angle was up to160.5°and its sliding angle was only2°. Theinfluence of depositing distance on the surface structure, chemicalcomposition and wettability of the candle soot coating on the copper foilwas studied.(5) A novel method was developed to obtain a superhydrophobiccopper surface by chemical deposition with the assistant of a template. Asuperhydrophobic candle soot coating was used a surface template on aniron sheet and copper was deposited on the iron sheet surface to obtain athree-dimensional structure including microstructure, sub-microstructureand nanostructure. After modifying with stearic acid, the wettability ofthe rough copper surface changed to be superhydrophobic fromhydrophilic; its water contact angle was up to156.9°and its sliding anglewas about5°.