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Abstract
Surfaces with anisotropic superhydrophobicity have great potential applications in drug delivery and microfluidic devices due to their unique properties of drag reduction and unidirectional fluid transportation. Observations of natural biological surfaces have proven that directional microstructures are indispensable for realising anisotropic superhydrophobicity. However, current lithography-based manufacturing approaches have limited capabilities to scale-up for real-world industrial applications. This paper proposes a sequential process of laser ablation and chemical etching (LA-CE), for the first time, to manufacture ratchet-like microstructures on AISI 316L stainless steel by harvesting the advantages of both methods. The laser ablation will form a specified recast layer that will be covered by an oxide layer on the specimen, and these two layers can be easily removed in the chemical etching process to obtain the periodic ratchet-like microstructures. According to the experimental results, the direction of the microstructures is determined by the laser beam feed direction. Both the width and depth of microstructures increase with the increase of laser power, which results in the disappearance of ridges. However, increasing pitch will lead to the ridges appearing again. The specimen with a pitch of 25 μm machined at a laser power of 20 W has a maximum contact angle of 158.2°. Moreover, with a dip angle of 7°, this specimen shows a strong anisotropic superhydrophobicity, the droplet easily rolls off the surface in the laser beam feed direction; however, it is pinned tightly in the opposite direction.
Original language | English |
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Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Nanomanufacturing and Metrology |
Early online date | 28 Aug 2019 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 28 Aug 2019 |
Keywords
- laser ablation
- chemical etching
- superhydrophobic surface
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Dive into the research topics of 'A sequential process for manufacturing nature-inspired anisotropic superhydrophobic structures on AISI 316L stainless steel'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 3 Finished
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Nanomanufactuirng mechanism while using nanostructured atomic force microscope (AFM) probes (Newton Mobility Grant))
31/03/19 → 30/03/22
Project: Research
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Micro-3D: Miniature Flexible & Reconfigurable Manufacturing System for 3D Micro-products
Luo, X., Ion, W., Qin, Y., Jagadeesan, A. P. & Zeng, Q.
EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)
1/07/13 → 31/12/17
Project: Research
Datasets
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Data for: "A sequential process for manufacturing nature-inspired anisotropic superhydrophobic structures on AISI 316L stainless steel"
Cai, Y. (Creator) & Luo, X. (Creator), University of Strathclyde, 19 Feb 2020
DOI: 10.15129/a4a6a68a-dfc0-47df-8cdd-04db6207d927
Dataset