Self-Supplying Liquidity Oil-Adsorbed Slippery Smooth Surface for Both Liquid and Solid Repellency

Inspired by pitcher-plants, slippery liquid-infused surfaces (LISs) comprised of a textured/smooth base-layer and a liquid-layer are an exciting emerging class of super-repellent surfaces. Herein, a smooth LIS with a flat base-layer is developed as a multifunctional tribosurface, which is termed a friction-reducing liquidity oil-adsorbed tribo-surface (FLOAT). The FLOAT is constructed via a novel self-supplying lubricant strategy from liquid-adsorbed smooth surfaces based on pi-COOH interactions at the interface between the solid base-layer and the infused-liquid-layer, resulting in a drastic friction reduction. The FLOAT demonstrates a friction coefficient of 0.05 for loads less than the strength of the coating; for loads greater than or equal to the strength of the coating, a friction coefficient of 0.08 is achieved by holding the liquid-layer between the FLOATs base-layer and the friction object using a self-supplying liquid-layer based on the interactions of the phenyl groups at the selectively collapsing concaves of the coating. Furthermore, the FLOAT easily sheds off both viscous and viscoelastic materials, shows high transparency, and can be easily fabricated using a controllable patterning surface. The FLOAT demonstrated herein shows potential as a next-generation tribosurface and provides new insights for the design of multifunctional liquid surfaces for various practical applications.