Appl Phys A DOI 10.1007/s00339-013-7660-0 A facile method for imparting superoleophobicity to polymer substrates Guina Ren · Zhaozhu Zhang · Xiaotao Zhu · Bo Ge · Kun Wang · Xianghui Xu · Xuehu Men · Xiaoyan Zhou Received: 6 November 2012 / Accepted: 7 March 2013 © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 Abstract A new method was presented to impart poly- mer substrate with superoleophobic properties. Aluminum/ polymer composite was created by a hot-pressing process, and rough surface textures needed to establish superoleo- phobicity were created by HCl etching and boiling water treatment. After surface fluorination, the surface became super-repellent towards water and several organic liquids, such as hexadecane. The effect of geometrical structure on hydrophobicity and oleophobicity was investigated, and the result showed that the synergistic action of microterraces and nanoflakes played a key role in establishing oleophobic- ity. A waterfall/jet test demonstrated that the obtained sur- face can keep its superoleophobicity after a long time expo- sure to water. Moreover, the obtained surface did not lose the superoleophobicity after placing it under cold condition for 7 days. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s00339-013-7660-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Z. Zhang ( ) · G. Ren · X. Zhu · B. Ge · K. Wang · X. Xu · X. Men · X. Zhou State Key Laboratory of Solid Lubrication, Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tianshui Road 18th, Lanzhou 730000, P.R. China e-mail: zzzhang@licp.cas.cn Fax: +86-931-4968098 X. Men ( ) e-mail: xhmen@licp.cas.cn G. Ren · X. Zhu · B. Ge · X. Zhou Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100039, P.R. China 1 Introduction Superoleophobic surfaces have recently generated immense commercial and academic interest due to their wide appli- cability in oil fluid transfer, antifouling, anticrawling, and so on [1–4]. Understanding the complementary roles of sur- face energy and surface texture on natural nonwetting sur- faces has led to the development of a number of biomimetic superhydrophobic surfaces [5, 6]. However, creating syn- thetic surfaces with superoleophobic properties has proven to be much more difficult than creating superhydrophobic surfaces. The challenge results from the similarity of the low surface tension of oils to that of the commonly used low energy materials, and this problem makes oils exhibit static CA less than 90 ◦ on all currently known natural and artifi- cial flat surfaces [2]. To address this challenge, several stud- ies systematically discussed the impact of surface texture on wettability and demonstrated that the overhang structure or the re-entrant surface curvature was essential to achieve superoleophobicity, besides the roughened texture and low surface energy materials [2, 3, 7, 8]. This understanding allowed for the possibility of constructing superoleopho- bic surfaces, although the pristine surface was oleophilic [9–22]. Besides the attention to re-entrant structures on a micrometer-scale, hierarchical textured structures (i.e., mul- tiscale surface roughness) can also be used to achieve super- oleophobicity. Fabrication methods involved electropoly- merization [23], spray-casting [24], silica spheres stacking layers [25], and chemical etching [26]. Although targeted superoleophobic surfaces have been created on the sub- strates of silicon, fabrics, metals, and others, for commer- cially available and widely used polymers, superoleophobic surfaces are extremely rare. As important engineering ma- terial, polymers, such as polythene, are easily fouled by oil and other organic matter due to their high surface energy.