Deriving Functional Interfaces from Chemically Reactive and Porous Dip Coating

Abstract

quotBioinspired liquid wettability and patterned interfaces remained an inspiration for developing various functional newlinematerials/interfaces for relevant and important applications. The essential criteria for contriving bio-inspired extremes newlineof water wettability (either superhydrophobicity or superhydrophilicity) is the co-optimization of hierarchical newlinetopography and essential surface chemistry. In general, such optimization is artificially achieved following various newlinetop-down and bottom-up approaches, where various hydrophilic building blocks are associated using electrostatic newlineinteraction, hydrogen bonding, and other weak bonding (e.g., metal-thiol etc.), for developing the desired hierarchical newlinefeatures and optimizing the appropriate chemistry on top of this featured interface. However, such common and newlineconventional designs are inappropriate for sustaining practically relentlessly harsh settings. So, further development newlinefor the synthesis of a durable and substrate-independent superhydrophobic coating is essential for various newlineprospective applications in real-world scenarios. In this thesis, I have successfully accounted a simple and singlestep newlinedip coating process to achieve a substrate- independent, chemically reactive, and porous polymeric coating newlinefollowing a 1,4-conjugate addition reaction at ambient conditions. Such chemically reactive polymeric dip coatings newlinewere further exploited for demonstrating pertinent applications, i.e., oil-water separation, self-cleaning, strain sensing, newlineand anti-counterfeiting. The thesis entitled as Deriving Functional Interfaces from Chemically Reactive and Porous newlineDip-Coating has been codified in six chapters. Chapter 1 accounts for the introduction of bio-inspired liquid newlinewettability and the discussion on the existing challenges related to durability, scalability and substrate independency. newlineThe potential utilization of prospective porous and chemically reactive coatings was also presented in this chapter. In newlineChapter 2, a simplistic approach of single step dip-coating technique is intro