A review on fundamentals, constraints and fabrication techniques of superhydrophobic coatings

Over the past two decades, scientific communities and coating manufacturers have presented superhydrophobic coatings for various applications such as automotive, marine, medical, and energy sectors, etc [1]. Worldwide, researchers reported the fundamentals, fabrication techniques [2] and applications of superhydrophobic coatings. But, most of the reported reviews provided the limited information on fundamentals and fabrication techniques of the superhydrophobic coatings and found more directed towards the applications of superhydrophobic coatings in different sectors [2-6]. But, this review presents a detailed description of the fundamentals of superhydrophobic coatings, problems in manufacturing such coatings and the fabrication techniques. Additionally, this review provides a glimpse of potential applications of such coatings. The major constraints to the development of superhydrophobic coatings are identified as the expensive superhydrophobic materials, nano feature durability, coating stability, precipitation/condensation problem, impact problem and emulsifier/oil wetting problem, etc. The best fabrication techniques of superhydrophobic coatings are identified as the sol-gel, wet-chemical, electrochemical deposition and Mussel-inspired chemistry. In future, the optimization of the control parameters of such processing routes is highly desired to develop the advanced superhydrophobic coatings for various applications.