Water-Based, Nonfluorinated Dispersions for Environmentally Benign, Large-Area, Superhydrophobic Coatings

Low-cost, large-area, superhydrophobic coating treatments are of high value to technological applications requiring efficient liquid repellency. While many applications are envisioned, only few are realizable in practice due to either the high cost or low durability of such treatments. Recently, spray deposition of polymer-particle dispersions has been demonstrated as an excellent means for producing low-cost, large-area, durable, superhydrophobic composite coatings/films; however, such dispersions generally contain harsh or volatile solvents, which are required for solution processing of polymers as well as for dispersing hydrophobic nanoparticles, thus inhibiting scalability due to the increased cost in chemical handling and environmental safety concerns. Moreover, such coatings usually contain fluoropolymers due to their inherent low surface energy, a requirement for superhydrophobicity, but concerns over their biopersistence has provided an impetus for eliminating these chemicals. For spray coating, the former problem can be overcome by replacing organic solvents with water, but this situation seems paradoxical: Producing a highly water-repellent coating from an aqueous dispersion. We report a water-based, nonfluorinated dispersion for the formation of superhydrophobic composite coatings applied by spray on a variety of substrates. We stabilize hydrophobic components (i.e., polymer, nanoparticles) in water, by utilizing chemicals containing acid functional groups (i.e., acrylic acid) that can become ionized in aqueous environments under proper pH control (pH > 7). The functional polymer utilized in this study is a copolymer of ethylene and acrylic acid, while the particle filler is exfoliated graphite nanoplatelet (xGnP), which contains functional groups at its periphery. Once spray deposited and dried, the components become insoluble in water, thus promoting liquid repellency. Such coatings can find a wide range of applications due to their benign processing nature as well as the variety of substrates on which they can be deposited.