Design of Lubricant Infused Surfaces. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • Lubricant infused surfaces (LIS) are a recently developed and promising approach to fluid repellency for applications in biology, microfluidics, thermal management, lab-on-a-chip, and beyond. The design of LIS has been explored in past work in terms of surface energies, which need to be determined empirically for each interface in a given system. Here, we developed an approach that predicts a priori whether an arbitrary combination of solid and lubricant will repel a given impinging fluid. This model was validated with experiments performed in our work as well as in literature and was subsequently used to develop a new framework for LIS with distinct design guidelines. Furthermore, insights gained from the model led to the experimental demonstration of LIS using uncoated high-surface-energy solids, thereby eliminating the need for unreliable low-surface-energy coatings and resulting in LIS repelling the lowest surface tension impinging fluid (butane, 13 mN/m) reported to date.

published proceedings

  • ACS Appl Mater Interfaces

altmetric score

  • 12

author list (cited authors)

  • Preston, D. J., Song, Y., Lu, Z., Antao, D. S., & Wang, E. N.

citation count

  • 91

complete list of authors

  • Preston, Daniel J||Song, Youngsup||Lu, Zhengmao||Antao, Dion S||Wang, Evelyn N

publication date

  • December 2017