Search

The superhydrophobic TiO 2 coating was fabricated on cotton fabric through a facile one step hot-pressing process after being dipped in n-octyltriethoxysilane and Ti-containing precursor mixed solution. The as-prepared fabric exhibited robust superhydrophobic with a water contact angle higher than 150° and realized an optimized UV protective factor of 45. The as-constructed superhydrophobic fabric was able to withstand more than 800 cycles of abrasion. Moreover, there was not apparent decrease of superhydrophobicity after 10 cycles of accelerated machine wash and the as-constructed fabric also showed a strong ability to resist acidic and alkaline solutions. Finally, the potential applications of such value-added fabrics self-cleaning, anti-fouling, and water-oil separation were investigated as well. The results demonstrated that the combination of n-octyltriethoxysilane and Ti-containing precursor coating endowed the pristine fabrics with excellent self-cleaning for dusts and anti-fouling for methylene blue dye, as well as excellent separation efficiency for the oil-water mixtures. This facile synthesis stragegy can also be extended to quickly construct multifunctional fabrics with speical wettability in a large scale and utilized in some promising fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It remains a great challenge to prepare multi-functional fabrics using a low-cost and scalable method with fluorine-free materials. In this paper, we report a new procedure for producing fluorine-free super hydrophobic cotton fabrics, via a simple dip-coating process. Firstly, a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) adhesive layer is deposited onto the cotton substrate, followed by the subsequent deposition of ZnO nanoparticles to enhance the surface roughness through an oil bath process. Finally, a second PDMS dip-coating is applied to construct a multi-layered PDMS-ZnO-PDMS composite coating on the cotton fabrics. The multi-layer coated samples display superhydrophobic properties, with a water contact angle (CA) exceeding 160°. Additionally, the new PDMS-ZnO-PDMS@cotton fabric exhibits excellent multi-functions, including UV-blocking, self-cleaning and oil-water separation. The prepared superhydrophobic fabric can withstand a large number of abrasion cycles and 20 cycles of accelerated washing without obvious decline in the water contact angle. This facile preparation method is of low-cost, environmentally friendly, and suitable for large-scale production of a series of specialty fabrics including sports clothing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]