Superhydrophobic cotton fabrics prepared by sol–gel coating of TiO2 and surface hydrophobization.pdf

IOP PUBLISHING SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF ADVANCED MATERIALS Sci. Technol. Adv. Mater. 9 (2008) 035001 (5pp) doi:10.1088/1468-6996/9/3/035001 Superhydrophobic cotton fabrics prepared by sol–gel coating of TiO2 and surface hydrophobization 1,2 1 2 2 Chao-Hua Xue , Shun-Tian Jia , Hong-Zheng Chen and Mang Wang 1 College of Resource and Environment, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710021, People’s Republic of China 2 Department of Polymer Science and Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, People’s Republic of China E-mail: xuech@zju.edu.cn Received 24 February 2008 Accepted for publication 6 May 2008 Published 1 September 2008 Online at stacks.iop.org/STAM/9/035001 Abstract By coating fibers with titania sol to generate a dual-size surface roughness, followed by hydrophobization with stearic acid, 1H , 1H , 2H , 2H -perfluorodecyltrichlorosilane or their combination, hydrophilic cotton fabrics were made superhydrophobic. The surface wettability and topology of cotton fabrics were studied by contact angle measurement and scanning electron microscopy. The UV-shielding property of the treated fabrics was also characterized by UV-vis spectrophotometry. Keywords: superhydrophobicity, titania sol, UV shielding, cotton fabrics (Some figures in this article are in colour only in the electronic version) 1. Introduction surface via the reaction with mono-epoxy-functionalized polydimethylsiloxane. For oleophobic textiles, perfluoralkyl In recent years, researchers have made impressive efforts to silane was used