Engineering superlyophobic surfaces on curable materials based on facile and inexpensive microfabrication

This paper proposes a facile, versatile, and low-cost approach for batch production of engineered superlyophobic surfaces (SLSs, simultaneously superhydrophobic and superoleophobic) on various curable materials. Based on the soft replication using poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) as the intermediate mold, T-shaped overhang microstructures on Si and dual-resist masters have been transferred to curable materials including poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), PDMS and glass resin. The as-fabricated polymer SLS replicas exhibit high structure fidelity, comparable nonwettability and excellent reproducibility for both water and oil during the 10 × 10 replication and possess new features such as tunable transparency. The proposed microfabrication approach for SLSs decouples the material and process dependence, greatly dilutes the fabrication cost and enables high-performance SLSs on a wide range of materials, which may initialize the broad applications of engineered SLSs for various low-contamination, low-adhesion and self-cleaning requirements in academy, industry and daily life. © 2014 the Partner Organisations