Design of Lubricant Infused Surfaces

• Published in: ACS applied materials & interfaces Vol. 9; no. 48; pp. 42383 - 42392
• Main Authors: Preston, Daniel J, Song, Youngsup, Lu, Zhengmao, Antao, Dion S, Wang, Evelyn N
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 06.12.2017
• Subjects: surface engineering; interfacial phenomena; slippery materials; fluid repellency; surface energy; soft materials; bioinspired surfaces
• ISSN: 1944-8244; 1944-8252
• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b14311

Lubricant infused surfaces (LIS) are a recently developed and promising approach to fluid repellency for applications in biology, microfluidics, thermal management, lab-on-a-chip, and beyond. The design of LIS has been explored in past work in terms of surface energies, which need to be determined empirically for each interface in a given system. Here, we developed an approach that predicts a priori whether an arbitrary combination of solid and lubricant will repel a given impinging fluid. This model was validated with experiments performed in our work as well as in literature and was subsequently used to develop a new framework for LIS with distinct design guidelines. Furthermore, insights gained from the model led to the experimental demonstration of LIS using uncoated high-surface-energy solids, thereby eliminating the need for unreliable low-surface-energy coatings and resulting in LIS repelling the lowest surface tension impinging fluid (butane, γ ≈ 13 mN/m) reported to date.