Facile preparation of super durable superhydrophobic materials

The low stability, complicated and expensive fabrication procedures seriously hinder practical applications of superhydrophobic materials. Here we report an extremely simple method for preparing super durable superhydrophobic materials, e.g., textiles and sponges, by dip coating in fluoropolymers (FPs). The morphology, surface chemical composition, mechanical, chemical and environmental stabilities of the superhydrophobic textiles were investigated. The results show how simple the preparation of super durable superhydrophobic textiles can be! The superhydrophobic textiles outperform their natural counterparts and most of the state-of-the-art synthetic superhydrophobic materials in stability. The intensive mechanical abrasion, long time immersion in various liquids and repeated washing have no obvious influence on the superhydrophobicity. Water drops are spherical in shape on the samples and could easily roll off after these harsh stability tests. In addition, this simple dip coating approach is applicable to various synthetic and natural textiles and can be easily scaled up. Furthermore, the results prove that a two-tier roughness is helpful but not essential with regard to the creation of super durable superhydrophobic textiles. The combination of microscale roughness of textiles and materials with very low surface tension is enough to form super durable superhydrophobic textiles. According to the same procedure, superhydrophobic polyurethane sponges can be prepared, which show high oil absorbency, oil/water separation efficiency and stability. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.