Making metal more durable for hot and corrosive environments

In the natural world, there are countless examples of animals and plants whose biological surfaces have evolved to repel water. Research in the past few decades has focused on simulating these surfaces, with a current emphasis on enhancing metal surfaces vulnerable to corrosion and pollution. The development of superamphiphobic materials — those that repel both oil and water — for metal surfaces is crucial to a variety of industrial applications, from shipbuilding and pipeline transportation to electronic device fabrication and self-cleaning technologies.

But synthesizing these materials is complex, expensive, and often produces byproducts, so the scale of their applicability has been limited.

Sun et al. developed a simple method for producing superamphiphobic materials that includes attaching copper oxide nanoclusters (CuO-NC) via immersion burning in situ to stainless steel meshes (SSM) before adding a coating of a silane fluoride compound mixture.

“Loading CuO-NC in situ on SSM by the immersion-burning method can effectively enhance adhesion between the superamphiphobic components and SSM,” said author Changjiang Li. “The silane fluoride group was grafted on to obtain the superamphiphobic coating by a solution deposition method.”

The researchers characterized the material they produced with field emission scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and X-ray diffractometry. They also examined their samples through various performance and durability metrics to determine their self-cleaning abilities and chemical and high-temperature stabilities.

“Our superamphiphobic metal coating technology is extremely promising,” said Li. “The process is very simple, can apply to different metals and can serve a wide range of challenging industrial applications, especially those with high temperatures and corrosive environments.”

Source: “Facile preparation of chemically stable metal mesh-based superamphiphobic surface toward effective anti-adhesion,” by Yinyu Sun, Zihan Yin, Caiyun Shen, Wei Yang, Qi Chen, Yu Liu, Zhongcheng Ke, and Changjiang Li, AIP Advances (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0238635 .