Super-hydrophilic SiOx coatings prepared by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition combined with gas aggregation source of nanoparticles

Vacuum-based strategy for production of super-hydrophilic nanostructured SiOx coatings on conventional polymers was developed. This method is based on pre-seeding of polymers with Ag nanoparticles fabricated by means of gas aggregation source of nanoparticles prior to the SiOx deposition. It is shown that at a sufficiently large amount of Ag nanoparticles the produced coatings exhibited nanotexture that possessed temporally stable super-hydrophilic character with water contact angles lower than 10° for a period of 2 years.