There are numerous performance benefits to having metal surfaces reject metal in a variety of applications. Metals are widely employed in a variety of industries, including construction, ships, bridges, electric power, and others. Metal materials, on the other hand, suffer from issues like corrosion and icing during usage, which reduces device performance and may pose a risk of injury. The wettability of the solid surface is the source of the hidden risk. Constructing a superhydrophobic surface on a metal substrate can successfully address the issues of corrosion inadequacy and easy icing while in use, while also providing particular functionalities like self-cleaning, oil-water separation, lubrication, and drag reduction.
Alfa Chemistry provides a number of surface coating technologies that may be used to functionalize metal surfaces and make them highly hydrophobic and oleophobic. This simple approach increases the performance of nearly any metal-based product. Make your metal surfaces hydrophobic and oleophobic by contacting us!
Why Do You Need A Hydrophobic Metal Coating?
To solve a wide range of metal application problems, we offer a variety of metal surface modification technologies. You might wish to consider applying our hydrophobic metal coating to increase the quality of your products.
- It's time-consuming, expensive, or impossible to clean the surfaces of your metal objects.
- The behavior of liquids on the surface of metal items has an impact on their performance.
- The physical barriers you're using now to keep liquids from flowing onto product surfaces aren't optimal.
- You don't want the glue to cling to the product's surface.
- You want to avoid contacting the product with water to cause electronic malfunctions.
- You want to prevent contaminating your products with water or oil since it will degrade their optical performance.
- You want to make the product's surface more wettable.
Suitable Surface Modification Coating Solution
Because most metal materials have relatively high surface energy and evident hydrophilicity, creating superhydrophobic surfaces with metals as the matrix is more difficult. Alfa Chemistry prepares metal surfaces with superhydrophobic qualities using biological tissues and structures as biomimetic objects, as inspired by nature.
The following are some of our current main preparation procedures, which include but are not limited to:
Template Method
As the initial template, we use natural materials with micro-and nano-scale surface topology, "print" a micro-nano structure on the polymer surface and then connect the polymer to the metal substrate's surface. Subsequent modifications such as stearic acid are required to achieve better superhydrophobic properties.
Laser Etching Method
We use a high-energy laser beam to transmit heat to the material surface and remove surface material by melting, vaporization, and chemical degradation in the localized area irradiated by the spot to obtain the necessary superhydrophobicity. Surface microstructures with various morphologies and size characteristics can be generated by varying the laser processing parameters.
Nanocomposite Spray Method
The method entails mixing nanoparticles with specific properties with a low surface energy dispersant, spraying them uniformly on the metal substrate's surface, and then obtaining a superhydrophobic surface with a micro-nano secondary structure formed by the accumulation of nanoparticles on the surface.
Sol-gel Method
The technology of employing a compound containing a highly chemically active component as a precursor, uniformly mixing it in a solvent, and causing a hydrolysis and condensation reaction to form a sol is referred to as this method. Slowly polymerizing sol particles will produce a gel with a three-dimensional spatial network structure. To completely remove the solvent, the gel is dried or thermally decomposed, and a micro-nano superhydrophobic surface with a spatial network structure is formed.
Fig 1. States of metal-based superhydrophobic surface prepared by sol-gel method. (Wu C. Y, et al. 2021)
Reference
- Wu C. Y, et al. (2021). "New Progress of Fabrication Techniques for Metal-based Superhydrophobic Surfaces." Journal of Harbin Institute of Technology. 53(7): 1-19.
