A facile and cost-effective approach to engineer surface roughness for preparation of large-scale superhydrophobic substrate with high adhesive force

This study presents a convenient avenue to fabricate polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with controllable surface morphologies and wetting characteristics via standard molding technique. The templates with engineered surface roughness were simply prepared by combinations of microfluidics and photo-polymerization of N-Isopropylacrylamide (NIPAM). The surface morphology of mold could be adjusted via ultraviolet-curing duration or the grafting density, which means that the surface of PDMS sample replicated from the mold could also be easily controlled based on the proposed method. Furthermore, via multiple grafting and replication processes, we have successfully demonstrated that hydrophobicity properties of prepared PDMS samples could be swiftly enhanced to ∼154° with highly adhesive force with resident water droplets. The obtained PDMS samples exhibited well resistance to external mechanical deformation even up to 100 cycles. The proposed scheme is timesaving, cost-effective and suitable for large-scale production of superhydrophobic PDMS substrates. We believe that the presented approach can provide a promising method for preparing superhydrophobic surface with highly adhesive force for on-chip liquid transport, localized reaction, etc.