Fabrication of Superoleophobic Surface on Stainless Steel by Hierarchical Surface Roughening and Organic Coating

Stainless steels is practically important corrosion-resistant metallic materials, and additional surface functionalities including self-cleaning, anti-fouling, anti-ice and snow sticking and fluid drag reduction by the introduction of superhydrophobic and superoleophobic surfaces are of recent interest. Here, we report the micro-/nano-hierarchical roughening of type 304 stainless steel surface by chemical and electrochemical etching and anodizing. Chemical etching in HCl + FeCl3 aqueous solution containing a surfactant introduces surface roughness of several tens micrometers scale and the electrochemical etching in HCl + HNO3 aqueous solution produces a number of etch pits of ~1 µm in size. Then, a porous anodic layer of the pore size of ~20 nm is formed on the etched surface by anodizing in ethylene glycol electrolyte containing 0.1 mol dm−3 NH4F and 0.1 mol dm−3 H2O. After fluoroalkylsilane (FAS) coating of the hierarchically rough surface to reduce the surface energy, the surface becomes superhydrophobic and superoleophobic; the advanced contact angle for hexadecane (surface tension of 27.6 mN m−1) is ~160° and the contact angle hysteresis is less than 10°. Since the FAS-coated flat surface is oleophilic, so that such hierarchically rough surface is of significant importance to achieve the superoleophobicity even for low surface tension liquids.