A facile strategy to fabricate bionic superhydrophobic armor based on utilization of metallographic structure heredity and reconstruction of anodized oxide film on alloy

Focusing on alloy system, a facile strategy was proposed to fabricate a micro/nano-structured bionic super -hydrophobic surface with enhanced anti-corrosion performance. It was implemented on iron carbon alloy sub-strate by combining one-step anodic oxidation with designed annealing to realize a protective armor. The study verified that the metallographic features in the alloy system and heredity during the anodic oxidation were crucial preconditions to construct bionic surface. The reconstruction of the anodized oxide films triggered by designed annealing changed the wetting mechanism as well as switching the hydrophilic/hydrophobic state by forming a smaller size point-to-point contact (Cassie-Baxter State) with the droplets. The synergistic effect of this unique bionic structures and low surface energy coating made the sample surface exhibit superhydrophobic state and excellent corrosion resistance. Such combination strategy lays the foundation for constructing functional surfaces of alloy systems. More importantly, it can be extended to multicomponent alloy systems, by selecting structure features even modulating feature components to simply realize a devisable protective armor, which provides more in-depth thinking for solving the longstanding corrosion problems of engineering materials.

Automated summary

This study proposes a fabrication technique for alloy systems, which combines one-step anodic oxidation with designed annealing to create a micro/nano-structured bionic superhydrophobic surface with enhanced anti-corrosion performance. The strategy can be applied to construct functional surfaces for alloy systems and provides a new approach to solving corrosion problems.