Fabrication of hierarchical super-omniphobic surface by biomimetic engineering and its applications

Abstract

The springtail, omniphobic surface symbol in nature, gives a great inspiration to develop artificial super-omniphobic surface. The cuticle of springtail displays remarkable omniphobicity due to unique hierarchical system. Many researchers have enormous paid to build engineering model with working principles of springtail itself. However, it has been rarely reported to fabrication artificial springtail with rational design because of technical issues. In here, we developed the fabrication technique of artificial springtail by combination of secondary sputtering lithography (SSL) and wrinkling processes. This surface completely follows structural characteristics of springtail from nano- to microscale. The rational design of artificial springtail showed the best performance of static and dynamic repellency even to ethanol droplets. Moreover, we proposed the correlation between static and dynamic wetting behaviors of ethanol droplet at the interface. We strongly believe this research can give insights to design high performance super-omniphobic surface for practical applications.