| A surface with water contact angle higher than 150°is called a superhydrophobic surface, it has many unique surface properties, like self-cleaning, anti-stain, hydrophobic, oleophobic and low friction, etc. These properties make the superhrophobic surfaces potentially applicable in many areas. Transparent superhydrophobic surface is one of the special hydrophobic surfaces, which has high transmittance of the visible light, and it can be used not only in windshields of cars and aircrafts, building glass, but also for the hulls of ships and tubes or pipes. Because of their enormous application potential, these surfaces have been the subject of great interest and extensive studies in recent years. But only few methods have been developed to fabricate transparent superhydrophobic surfaces so far, including plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PE-CVD), sol-gel, sublimation, phase separation and so on. These methods mentioned above have some disadvantages, such as high-cost, rigorous experiment conditions and equipments, and difficulties in scale-up preparations. Therefore it is important and meaningful to make the fabrication of transparent superhydrophobic surface controllable, low-cost and applicable in large-scale.In the present study, we used a sol-gel technique to balance the surface roughness and visible light transmittance, and explored a method of fabricating transparent superhydrophobic coatings on glass substrate. Alumina sol and silica sol were synthesized for the coatings, FE-SEM,AFM,FT-IR,UV-Vis,CA were used for surface characterizations. The coatings fabricated possess high water static CAs of over 150°, small sliding angles of less than 5°, and have relatively high average visible light transmittances. The method we found is simply operable, controllable, low-cost and large-scale applicable. The influences of the experiment conditions to the coatings were also discussed in this paper, and Cassie model was employed for theoretic analysis of the coatings. |
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