This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A new way to imprint complex surfaces on low-cost, sustainable polymers could be used in a wide range of industries, including water-repellent coatings, optical devices and data storage disks. The complex nano- and microscale patterns on sulfur-derived polymers, unveiled this week in the ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces journal, build on a wide range of green chemistry solutions led by Flinders University.
"This discovery provides a way to create these technically challenging and time-consuming patterns that can be useful to repel water, prevent biofilm formation and manipulate light in optics applications," said senior author ARC Future Fellow Professor Justin Chalker, a global leader in sulfur chemistry. "Our team invented a one-step method to make complex patterns on low-cost polymer surfaces using laser energy without the need for expensive materials. "Installing different patterns on the polymer surface can have multiple applications—for example, using water-repellent materials in self-cleaning, antifouling and anti-icing surfaces." Lead author Dr.
Abigail Mann, from the Chalker Lab at Flinders University, said using low-power lasers to create these innovative surfaces is an exciting development. "It opens up the possibility of using these intricate polymer surfaces in a wide range of high-value applications," Mann said. Her Ph.D. focused on the discovery of creating high-density data storage on polymers made in the inverse vulcanization process.
Christopher Gibson said the modification of polysulfide surfaces with low-power lasers could also support advances in electronics, information storage, biomedical devices, microfluidics and other applications—plus patterns that interact with light and reflect a range of iridescent colors for optics and anti-counterfeiting devices. "Without this research group, the accidental discovery I made during routine analysis of the polymer surface at Flinders University would have remained an interesting footnote, rather than becoming the focus of a series of breakthrough studies," Gibson said. Gibson is director of Adelaide Microscopy in South Australia.
The latest trials of microscale patterns on the otherwise black surface of a low-cost sulfur-derived polymer have enabled the creation of structural color, similar to the iridescent colors observed in butterfly wings and peacock feathers. In anti-counterfeiting devices, this complex pattern could serve as a hidden barcode that can be read with collimated light projected at certain angles. In the new study, Professor of physical chemistry Chiara Neto and other University of Sydney researchers provided expertise in adding nanotexturing, aiming to create "superhydrophobic" water-repellent surfaces that often require perfluorinated materials linked to the production of harmful PFAS in their manufacture and use.
The polymer, made from abundant and inexpensive sulfur from petroleum refining and dicyclopentadiene, is highly sensitive to low-power lasers of approximately 1 mW—weaker than a typical laser pointer. Very short exposure times to this low-energy laser light caused swelling in the polymer—something not usually observed with other common polymers or plastics. Researchers then found the swelling could be controlled, with the size and shape of the modification directly related to the laser exposure time—and the modification was highly stable, persisting for months to years.
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