Dip-coating for fibrous materials: mechanism, methods and applications

This paper presents a review on dip-coating for fibrous materials, mainly concentrated on the mechanism, recently developed dip-coating methods and novel functional applications. The emphasis has been made here, to present theoretical basis of dip-coating-induced film deposition, especially, the reported works to predict the thickness based on various processing parameters. Different modified dip-coating techniques to fabricate deposited films for fibrous substrate have also been gathered. The scope of reviewed dip-coating methods are not only conventional solution and sol-gel-based dip-coating, but also recently developed vacuum-assisted, spin-assisted, photo-assisted and multi-layered dip-coating methods. An overview of reported and potential applications for coated fibrous materials has also been given, which mainly including self-cleaning, oil-water separation, conductive textiles, fibrous-based energy storage devices, and photonic crystals, etc. This review is intended to give readers a good horizon for the present status concerning variety of studies and applications related to dip-coating. An effort has been made here to report the important contributions in the area of dip-coating for fibrous substrate, and critical points regarding future research directions are outlined in the summary.