Facile construction of robust fluorine-free superhydrophobic TiO2@fabrics with excellent anti-fouling, water-oil separation and UV-protective properties

The superhydrophobic TiO2 coating was fabricated on cotton fabric through a facile one step hot-pressing process after being dipped in n-octyltriethoxysilane and Ti-containing precursor mixed solution. The as-prepared fabric exhibited robust superhydrophobic with a water contact angle higher than 150 degrees and realized an optimized UV protective factor of 45. The as-constructed superhydrophobic fabric was able to withstand more than 800 cycles of abrasion. Moreover, there was not apparent decrease of superhydrophobicity after 10 cycles of accelerated machine wash and the as-constructed fabric also showed a strong ability to resist acidic and alkaline solutions. Finally, the potential applications of such value-added fabrics self-cleaning, anti-fouling, and water-oil separation were investigated as well. The results demonstrated that the combination of n-octyltriethoxysilane and Ti-containing precursor coating endowed the pristine fabrics with excellent self-cleaning for dusts and antifouling for methylene blue dye, as well as excellent separation efficiency for the oil-water mixtures. This facile synthesis stragegy can also be extended to quickly construct multifunctional fabrics with speical wettability in a large scale and utilized in some promising fields.