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pH Responsive Reversibly Tunable Wetting Surfaces

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Stimuli-Responsive Dewetting/Wetting Smart Surfaces and Interfaces

Part of the book series: Biologically-Inspired Systems ((BISY,volume 11))

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Abstract

Smart surfaces with tunable wetting characteristics have recently gained a lot of attention from scientists and engineers due to the interesting underlying fundamentals as well as tremendous applications in areas including microfluidics, lab-on-a-chip, bio-adhesion, oil-water separation, analytical and medical applications to name a few. Surface wettability can either be tuned by passive methods where different surface energy materials are coated on a surface depending upon the requirement. Alternatively, the surface wettability can be tuned actively where a responsive coating is coated on a surface and the wettability can be tuned with respective external stimulus e.g. light, temperature, pH, electric field, magnetic field, mechanical strain etc. Surfaces with pH responsive wetting behaviour allow control of liquids with high precision which is essentially required in many fluidic devices. Compared to other responsive wetting surfaces, pH responsive wetting surfaces are easy to fabricate and are more stable as well. They also show improved reversible transition between hydrophilic and hydrophobic states with much smaller hysteresis. In this chapter, we discuss various studies involving pH responsive wetting/dewetting system with fundamentals as well as potential applications.

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Acknowledgement

KK acknowledges financial assistance from BRNS (DAE) Young Scientist Research Award and DST, New Delhi through its Unit of Excellence on Soft Nanofabrication at IIT Kanpur.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Reeta Pant, Sneha Dattatreya, Jitesh Barman & Krishnacharya Khare

  2. Center for NanoSciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Krishnacharya Khare

Authors
  1. Reeta Pant
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  2. Sneha Dattatreya
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  3. Jitesh Barman
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  4. Krishnacharya Khare
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Krishnacharya Khare .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Structural Materials Research Institute, Nagoya, Japan

    Atsushi Hozumi

  2. Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Biomedical Engineering, School of Chemistry, Beihang University, Beijing, China

    Lei Jiang

  3. Department of Chemistry, KAIST, Daejeon, Korea (Republic of)

    Haeshin Lee

  4. Chitose Institute of Science and Technology, Chitose Shi, Japan

    Masatsugu Shimomura

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Pant, R., Dattatreya, S., Barman, J., Khare, K. (2018). pH Responsive Reversibly Tunable Wetting Surfaces. In: Hozumi, A., Jiang, L., Lee, H., Shimomura, M. (eds) Stimuli-Responsive Dewetting/Wetting Smart Surfaces and Interfaces. Biologically-Inspired Systems, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92654-4_3

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