Bionic construction of superhydrophobic smart surface has been a research hotspot in the community of functional interface material. Dynamic wettability control has aroused much concern in recent years due to its important value of application in microfluidic systems (e.g., lossless transfer of micro-droplets, and open microreactor design). We designed a side-chain polymer containing azophenyl group, and constructed a set of superhydrophobic surfaces with hierarchical structures by combining the top-down (lithographic microarray silicon wafer) and bottom-up (self-organization of side chain groups integrated with spin coating) methods. Superhydrophobic adhesive light-controlled fast reversible switch was achieved through the trans/cis isomerization of azobenzene group; in other words, the superhydrophobic low-water adhesion and the superhydrophobic high-water adhesion were successfully applied to the same surface to achieve the in-situ light-controlled reversible switch. This research has been officially accepted by Adv. Funct. Mater.

Article: “In Situ Fully Light-Driven Switching of Superhydrophobic Adhesion”, Chao Li, Yuanyuan Zhang, Jie Ju, Futao Cheng, Mingjie Liu, Lei Jiang and Yanlei Yu*, Adv. Funct. Mater., 2012, 22 (4), 760-763.

DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201101922.