Changing the wetting properties of surfaces is attracting great interest in many fields, in particular to achieve a surface with a superhydrophobic behavior. Laser machining is an emerging technique to functionalize materials with high precision and flexibility without any chemical treatment. However, when it is necessary to treat large area surfaces laser-based methods are still too slow to be exploited in industrial productions. In this work, we show that by improving the laser texture strategy it is possible to reduce the laser processing time to produce superhydrophobic aluminum alloy surfaces. Three different surface texture geometries were micromachined; namely, square, circular and triangular lattice grooves. We found that if the spacing between the grooves is narrow, i.e., when the percentage of the textured surface is high, the volume of air trapped inside the micromachined structures plays an important role in the wetting behavior. Meanwhile, when the groove spacing approaches the droplet dimensions, the texture geometry has a preponderant influence. Based on these findings an appropriate choice of the laser texture strategy allowed the fabrication of superhydrophobic aluminum alloy surfaces with a 10% reduction of processing time.
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机译：改变表面的润湿性质在许多领域吸引了极大的兴趣，特别是实现具有超疏水性行为的表面。激光加工是一种新兴技术，用于在没有任何化学处理的情况下用高精度和灵活性挥发材料。然而，当有必要处理大面积表面时，基于激光的方法仍然过于缓慢，以便在工业生产中被利用。在这项工作中，我们表明，通过改善激光纹理策略，可以减少激光加工时间以产生超疏水铝合金表面。三种不同的表面纹理几何形状是微机械的;即，方形，圆形和三角形格子槽。我们发现，如果凹槽之间的间隔窄，即，当纹理表面的百分比高时，捕获在微机械结构内的空气的体积在润湿行为中起重要作用。同时，当凹槽间距接近液滴尺寸时，纹理几何形状具有优势的影响。 Based on these findings an appropriate choice of the laser texture strategy allowed the fabrication of superhydrophobic aluminum alloy surfaces with a 10% reduction of processing time.
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