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Material surfaces with tailored aerophobicity are crucial for applications where gas bubble wettability has to be controlled, e.g., gas storage and transport, electrodes, bioreactors or medical devices. Here, we present switchable underwater aerophobicity of hydrophobic polymeric substrates, which respond to heat with multilevel micro-and nanotopographical changes. The cross-linked poly[ethylene-co-(vinyl acetate)] substrates possess arrays of microcylinders with a nanorough top surface. It is hypothesized that the specific micro-/nanotopography of the surface allows trapping of a water film at the micro interspace and in this way generates the aerophobic behavior. The structured substrates were programmed to a temporarily stable, nanoscale flat substrate showing aerophilic behavior. Upon heating, the topographical changes caused a switch in contact angle from aerophilic to aerophobic for approaching air bubbles. In this way, the initial adhesion of air bubbles to the programmed flat substrate could be turned into repellence for the recovered substrate surface. The temperature at which the repellence of air bubbles starts can be adjusted from 58 +/- 3 degrees C to 73 +/- 3 degrees C by varying the deformation temperature applied during the temperature-memory programming procedure. The presented actively switching polymeric substrates are attractive candidates for applications, where an on-demand gas bubble repellence is advantageous. (c) 2018 Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Zentrum fur Material- und Kustenforschung. Published by Elsevier Ltd.
Soft robots and devices with the advanced capability to perform adaptive motions similar to that of human beings often have stimuli-sensitive polymeric materials as the key actuating component. The external signals triggering the smart polymers’ actuations can be transmitted either via a direct physical connection between actuator and controlling unit (tethered) or remotely without a connecting wire. However, the vast majority of such polymeric actuator materials are limited to one specific type of motion as their geometrical information is chemically fixed. Here, we present magnetically driven nanocomposite actuators, which can be reversibly reprogrammed to different actuation geometries by a solely physical procedure. Our approach is based on nanocomposite materials comprising spatially segregated crystallizable actuation and geometry determining units. Upon exposure to a specific magnetic field strength the actuators’ geometric memory is erased by the melting of the geometry determining units allowing the implementation of a new actuator shape. The actuation performance of the nanocomposites can be tuned and the technical significance was demonstrated in a multi-cyclic experiment with several hundreds of repetitive free-standing shape shifts without losing performance.