Journal of Materials Science, Vol.56, No.4, 3525-3534, 2021
Temperature-dependent wetting characteristics of micro-nano-structured metal surface formed by femtosecond laser
The hydrophilicity induced by micro-nano-structured surface has aroused great attention for promising applications. In this work, the temperature-dependent surface wettability with different micro-nano-structures prepared by femtosecond lasers is studied systematically. It is found that the contact angle of both the micro- and nano-structural hydrophilic surfaces reduces as the ambient temperature decreases from 60 to 20 degrees C, but the contact angles of the typical microscale surfaces increase when the surface temperature reduces from 20 to 5 degrees C when the surface temperature is lower than ambient temperature. Furthermore, it is found that some microscale structural samples show a much weaker temperature dependence than others, which is experimentally proved to be due to the strong capillary effects in those specific microscale structures. By contrast, hydrophobic micro-nano-structural samples with the same structure obtained by silanization process always show that the hydrophobicity of both nano- and micro-structured surfaces decreases when temperature decreases from 20 to 5 degrees C. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to report the temperature-dependent wettability of hydrophilic micro-nano-structured surfaces with surface temperature below ambient temperature. The findings in this work can be applied to the micro- and nanoscale structural surface formed by other methods, and it will be beneficial to the engineering design and manufacture of micro-nano-structured surfaces to achieve the desired performance of the wetting function, which is of great significance to the application of hydrophilic micro-nano-structured surfaces in varied temperature surroundings.