Fabrication of nickel micromesh sheets and evaluation of their water-repellent and water-proof abilities

Nickel micromesh sheets were designed and fabricated and their water-repellent and water-proof abilities were characterized. The network-type microstructures of the micromesh sheets functioned as micro-protrusions of lotus leaves, which allowed the sheets to superhydrophobic. The micromesh enabled the material waves, including sound and light waves, to pass through the microholes, but repelled water. Because of the effects of the micromesh and plasma polymerized fluorocarbon (PPFC) coating, the contact angle of the micromesh sheets was drastically jumped up from 63° of the non-coated nickel flat film to 140° of the PPFC-coated nickel micromesh, which modified the nickel sheet from hydrophilic to superhydrophobic. The narrower lattice width in the micromesh was more effective at enhancing the water-repellency. On the other hand, the narrow lattice width weakened the water-proof ability. Reducing the hole size and increasing the lattice width of the micromesh are necessary to improve the water-proof ability.

[1]  Kahp Y Suh,et al.  Nanoengineered multiscale hierarchical structures with tailored wetting properties. , 2006, Langmuir : the ACS journal of surfaces and colloids.

[2]  A. Cassie,et al.  Wettability of porous surfaces , 1944 .

[3]  Neelesh A. Patankar,et al.  Multiple Equilibrium Droplet Shapes and Design Criterion for Rough Hydrophobic Surfaces , 2003 .

[4]  B. Bhushan,et al.  Wetting of rough three-dimensional superhydrophobic surfaces , 2006 .

[5]  Ikeda,et al.  Ultra-hydrophobic fluorine polymer by Ar-ion bombardment. , 2000, Colloids and surfaces. B, Biointerfaces.

[6]  C. Wong,et al.  Lotus Effect coating and its application for microelectromechanical systems stiction prevention , 2004, 2004 Proceedings. 54th Electronic Components and Technology Conference (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37546).

[7]  X. Ye,et al.  Tuning wettability and getting superhydrophobic surface by controlling surface roughness with well-designed microstructures , 2005, The 13th International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems, 2005. Digest of Technical Papers. TRANSDUCERS '05..

[8]  Younan Xia,et al.  Nanostructured superhydrophobic surfaces , 2005 .

[9]  Jin Zhai,et al.  Reversible super-hydrophobicity to super-hydrophilicity transition of aligned ZnO nanorod films. , 2004, Journal of the American Chemical Society.

[10]  W. Barthlott,et al.  Purity of the sacred lotus, or escape from contamination in biological surfaces , 1997, Planta.

[11]  Guozhong Cao,et al.  Optically transparent superhydrophobic silica-based films , 2005 .

[12]  Xianting Zeng,et al.  Increasing hydrophobicity of sol-gel hard coatings by chemical and morphological modifications , 2005 .

[13]  Surface Wettability in Terms of Prominence and Depression of Diverse Microstructure and Their Sizes , 2007 .