Improving Surface Hydrophobicity by Microrolling-Based Texturing

A two-pass microrolling-based texturing (μRT) process was utilized to improve the hydrophobicity of aluminum surfaces. Square micropillars were fabricated on aluminum sheets by two mutually orthogonal forming passes by a roller pretextured with microgrooves. Subsequently, the droplet contact angle was measured to evaluate the hydrophobicity of the surface. Results show that surfaces with μRT-imprinted textures have higher contact angles than nontextured surfaces indicating improved hydrophobicity. Furthermore, the process has led to the creation of hierarchical valleylike features on top of each of the micropillars caused by the pile-up effect during the forming process. It was hypothesized that such hierarchical features positively contribute to the improved hydrophobicity of the surface. This hypothesis was validated by testing surfaces with a similar hierarchical textured pattern produced by laser-induced plasma micromachining (LIPMM). The effects of various aspects of texture geometry including surface area-to-volume ratio and groove aspect ratio on the surface contact angle and the anisotropy of the contact angles were investigated.