Facile construction of robust fluorine-free superhydrophobic TiO2@fabrics with excellent anti-fouling, water-oil separation and UV-protective properties

Publication date: 15 August 2017
Source:Materials & Design, Volume 128
Author(s): Shouwei Gao, Jianying Huang, Shuhui Li, Hui Liu, Feiyang Li, Yuwei Li, Guoqiang Chen, Yuekun Lai
The superhydrophobic TiO2 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 800cycles of abrasion. Moreover, there was not apparent decrease of superhydrophobicity after 10cycles 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.

Graphical abstract

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