Journal article
Superhydrophobicity from the Inside
Tomer Simovich, Cameron Ritchie, George Belev, David ML Cooper, Robert N Lamb
Langmuir | American Chemical Society | Published : 2017
Abstract
The nature of trapped air on submersed ultra-water-repellent interfaces has been investigated. These gaseous layers (plastrons) can last from hours to, in some examples such as the Salvinia molesta fern, months. The interface of submerged superhydrophobic surfaces with carefully controlled micropatterned surface roughness has been probed using synchrotron-based high-resolution X-ray phase tomography. This technique looks in situ, through the aqueous/gas interface in three dimensions. Long-term plastron stability appears to correlate with the appearance of scattered microdroplets <20 μm in diameter that are sandwiched within the 30 μm thick gaseous interfacial layer. These microdroplets are c..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
The financial support of the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects (Project DP120104536) is gratefully acknowledged. We acknowledge Dan Smith for his assistance in sample preparation. This work was performed in part at the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN) in the Victorian Node of the Australian National Fabrication Facility (ANFF). We acknowledge travel funding provided by the International Synchrotron Access Program (ISAP) managed by the Australian Synchrotron and funded by the Australian Government. Research described in this paper was performed on 05ID-2 beamline<SUP>23</SUP> at the EMIT facility at the Canadian Light Source, which is supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the University of Saskatchewan, the Government of Saskatchewan, Western Economic Diversification Canada, the National Research Council Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.