Investigation Of Fabricating Superhydrophobic Stainless Steel Surface And Its Applications

The solid surface with high water repellency has many special applications, which has been widely investigated by researchers. Inspired by nature, a variety of methods have been developed to fabricate superhydrophobic surfaces, which include wet chemical etching, self-assembly, plasma etching, sol-gel method, chemical vapor deposition, template method, electrochemical method and other methods. However, most of these methods remain certain limitations, such as complex process control, severe conditions, special equipment, expensive materials, long period and poor durability. Therefore, it is of great value to develop a low-cost and large-scale fabrication method to fabricate surfaces with high water repellency.Stainless steel is a very significant and irreplaceable engineering material with extensive application in the fields of industry, agriculture, and our daily life. In this paper, two fabrication methods including bio-inspired micro-nano binary structures and a facile and low-cost one-step chemical etching methods were proposed.(1) Inspired by "lotus effect", a super water repellent stainless steel surface was achieved by chemical etching and fluorination modification. The SEM images show that the surface is covered with micro-nanoscale structures (microstructures with the diameter of 2?5?m and nanostructures with the diameter of 200 nm). The maximum contact angle is about 170°. The anti-corrosion resistance performance is more than 20 times that of the original stainless steel.(2) A much efficient and low-cost one-step chemical etching method for fabricating super water-repellent surfaces on the stainless steel has also been reported. The effects of HCl concentration and the chemical etching time on the surface morphology and the wettability of the stainless steel surface were investigated. The SEM image shows that a lot of "honeycomb-like" three dimensional network microstructures are distributed on the superhydrophobic stainless steel substrate, which enhance the roughness of the surface dramatically and cause high superhydrophobicity and anti-corrosion resistance performance. The maximum contact angle is about 175°.In this article, the surface with high water-repellency was fabricated by chemical etching and fluorination modification. A superhydrophobic stainless steel surface with high corrosion resistance performance was achieved by improving the experiment parameters.