Preparation and performance enhancements of wear-resistant, transparent PU/SiO₂ superhydrophobic coating

ABSTRACT

The wear resistance and transparency properties of superhydrophobicity are most important issue essential for the application of superhydrophobic materials in industry. In this paper, we successfully prepared good wear resistance PU/SiO₂ (polyurethane/silica) composite superhydrophobic coating with the double-step sol–gel route. The PU and SiO₂ coating occurs crosslinking reaction forming composite superhydrophobic coating. The superhydrophobic coating surface is characterised by environmental scanning electron microscope and other testing methods, the results show that the PU/SiO₂ composite superhydrophobic coating surface has excellent superhydrophobic properties and the Sa value was 332.5 nm. We used the pressure of 5 KPa to verify the wear resistance which the PU/SiO₂ composite superhydrophobic coating surface exhibits good wear resistance, the water contact angle (WCA) still remains 138.7° after the abrasion resistance test. The PU/SiO₂ composite superhydrophobic coating has high transparency in the visible light. The largest WCA of PU/SiO₂ composite superhydrophobic coating could reach 162.1°.

KEYWORDS:

• Superhydrophobic
• abrasion resistance
• transmittance
• PU/SiO₂
• sol–gel method

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 51521001 and 51572208), the 111 Project (B13035), the National Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province (Nos. 2014CFB257 and 2014CFB258) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (WUT: 2015 Ш 059).