ANISOTROPIC WETTING SURFACES MACHINED BY DIAMOND TOOL WITH TIPS MICROSTRUCTURED BY FOCUSED ION BEAM

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of hydrophobic surfaces. Hydrophobic surfaces have been used in multiple applications in microfluidic devices due to their properties of self-cleaning, and also in deicing products. Conventionally, hydrophobic surfaces were created by laser cutting, self-assembly and other chemical processing methods. However, in most of these methods, hydrophobicity of the surface cannot be maintained for an extended time or restricted to limited set of materials. A low-cost, high-throughput method to generate highly hydrophobic anisotropic surface has been developed in this thesis which uses Computer Numerical Control (CNC) machining employing diamond tools whose tips have been micro-structured using Focused Ion Beam (FIB) built tips. The versatility of this method has been demonstrated by machining both metal and polymeric materials. Significant anisotropic wetting has been observed on the machined surface with the anisotropic contact angle can reach up to 71.6 degree and highly-hydrophobic property with contact angle of 163.1degree on 6061 Aluminum Alloy and 155.7 degree on PMMA surface.