Journal of Surface Engineered Materials and Advanced Technology, 2012, 2, 76-94 doi:10.4236/jsemat.2012.22014 Published Online April 2012 (http://www.SciRP.org/journal/jsemat) Recent Progress in Preparation of Superhydrophobic Surfaces: A Review Sanjay Subhash Latthe 1* , Annaso Basavraj Gurav 1 , Chavan Shridhar Maruti 2 , Rajiv Shrikant Vhatkar 1 1 Department of Physics, Shivaji University, Kolhapur, India; 2 Netaji Science College, Solapur, India. Email: * sanjaylatthe@yahoo.com Received December 9 th , 2011; revised January 5 th , 2012; accepted January 17 th , 2012 ABSTRACT In nature, water-repellency (superhydrophobicity) is found, besides in plants, in insects and bird feathers. The booming field of biomimetics allows one to mimic nature to develop nanomaterials, nanodevices, and processes which offer de- sirable properties. Biomimetics means mimicking biology or nature. Inspired from nature, which reveals excellent su- perhydrophobicity, researchers have recently developed and implemented biomimetic superhydrophobic surfaces in a variety of smart and simple ways. Superhydrophobicity is an effect where surface roughness and chemical composition combine to generate unusual water repellent surface, causing water to bounce and roll off the surface. This review arti- cle provides the overview of the recent progress (within the last four years) in the synthesis, characterization, theoretical modelling, and applications of superhydrophobic surfaces, with focus on the different techniques used and how they have developed over the years. At last, the difficulties related to implementation of superhydrophobic surfaces in day to day life are discussed. This review can find interesting for students, scientists and industrial companies working espe- cially on superhydrophobic surfaces. Keywords: Superhydrophobic; Wetting; Water Contact Angle; Biomimetic; Nanostructure; Self-Cleaning 1. Introduction Biomimetic surfaces and materials received great atten- tion of scientists and engineers due to their unusual prop- erties. Biologically inspired design, adaptation, or deriva- tion from nature is referred to as “biomimetics” [1] Bio- logical tiny structures have been observed on many kinds of surfaces such as lotus leaves, rice leaves, butterfly wings, mosquito eyes, moth eyes, cicada wings, red rose petals, gecko feet, desert beetle, spider silks, and fish scales which exhibit excellent hydrophobicity and/or superhydropho- bicity [2-6]. Such natural structures offer new insights into the design of artificial superhydrophobic structures. A superhydrophobic surface is a surface on which a drop of water forms an almost perfect sphere and even a very slight tilting is sufficient to cause the water drop to roll off. In addition to high water contact angle and low slid- ing angle, the ability of a surface to bounce off water droplets constitutes the third property of a superhydro- phobic surface that is important for both biological and technical applications [7]. These surfaces are of special interest, because properties such as anti-sticking, anti-con- tamination, and self-cleaning are expected. These proper- ties are attractive for many industrial and biological ap- plications such as anti-biofouling paints for boats, antis- ticking of snow for antennas and windows, self-cleaning windshields for automobiles, microfluidics, lab-on-a-chip devices, metal refining, stain resistant textiles, anti-soiling architectural coatings, dust-free coatings on building glass- es and so on [8-12]. Recently, a research work has been devoted towards the preparation and theoretical modelling of superhydropho- bic surfaces as observed by the large number of publica- tions and diverse approaches. Many strategies to create superhydrophobic surfaces have been put forward. Many of the preparation techniques are simple, inexpensive; however, some of them involved multistep procedures and harsh conditions, or required specialized reagents and equipment. Up to now, procedures of roughening the surface followed by hydrophobization or transforming low-surface-energy materials into rough surfaces have been commonly used to produce superhydrophobic sur- faces. The various methods for the preparation of biomi- metic superhydrophobic surfaces since last two decades have been reported, such as phase separation [13], elec- trochemical deposition [14], template method [15,16], Emulsion [17], plasma method [18], crystallization con- trol [19], chemical vapor deposition [20], wet chemical reaction [21], sol-gel processing [22-25], lithography [26], electrospinning [27], solution immersion [28] and * Corresponding author. Copyright © 2012 SciRes. JSEMAT