Superamphiphobic Porous Structure: Design and Implementation

Porous materials with an excellent super-repellency exist in many applications in life and industry, and their preparation is convenient and cost effective. It would be advantageous to fabricate super-repellent porous materials. However, because of a lack of understanding of the detailed relationship between structural features and super-repellency, it is difficult to prepare porous materials with a superamphiphobicity. Based on a theoretical analysis and the discussion of several porous structures' repellant behaviors, the criteria for fabricating super-repellent porous materials are proposed as: (1) the most appropriate pore size being tens of micrometers to approximate to 100-200 mu m; (2) a larger pore height; (3) a smaller porous-network thickness; and (4) an appropriate adequate secondary microscopic structure that favors the effective pinning of a gas-liquid-solid three-phase contact line. According to the four criteria, an optimized superamphiphobic porous material is achieved, which is a dopamine/redox graphene-oxide-assembled microscale porous material, which displays a super-repellency for droplets with a surface tension of 72.8-20 mN m(-1). By using the dopamine/graphene-assembled microscale porous material, a low gate voltage (500 V) for water impaling is acquired.