Grant: Engage Grants Program

Textiles with a superhydrophobicity/icephobicity properties could find applications as water resistant apparel*and would generally be useful for any kind of application where textile surfaces are exposed to the*environment. Formation, adhesion, and accumulation of water, snow, frost, glaze, rime, or their mixtures can*cause severe problems for any fabrics. An ice repellent surface is a surface on which the ice adhesion strength*is significantly lowered and where ice accumulation can be easily removed from the surface.It is well known*now that the combination of proper surface roughness and materials with low surface energy is a successful*way to prepare superhydrophobic/icephobic surfaces. However, the low mechanical stability of*superhydrophobic/icephobic surfaces is the bottleneck we are facing in their practical applications.*The objective of this project, with accompanying our partner Chlorophylle, is to develop a new*anti-wet/anti-ice textile surfaces with a dry atmospheric pressure plasma technique including an in-depth*characterization of the resulting superhydrophobic/icephobic fabrics. The plasma system uses a compress*ambient air, and the material processing zone is at the open atmosphere. Therefore, the system meets ideally*industrial production requirements.*In this project, we investigate how to control and optimize the deposition chemistry and the influence of*different operational parameters (discharge power, deposition time, precursor flow rate, substrate-plasma*distance, ...) on thin film properties. The wettability and physico-chemical characterization of developed*surfaces will be studied using water contact angle, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), and SEM analyses.*The ice delayed formation and ice adhesion measurement will be carried out to evaluate the icephobicity of the*new developed coating. Finally, the durability of developed surfaces will be studied against some extreme*environmental condition as different pH solution.