Heterostructured films with additional material interfaces and compartments offer the means to prepare composite materials where the surface and the bulk can be independently engineered and controlled. In this talk, we exploit this ability to separately tune the surface and bulk properties of a film for optical applications such as sensors, lenses, and displays that often suffer from a variety of environmental challenges such as excessive fogging and surface contamination. We demonstrate that a heterostructured polymer thin film consisting a hydrophilic reservoir capped with various hydrophobic capping layer allows water vapor to preferentially condense into the underlying hydrophilic reservoir, while the hydrophobic capping layer resists wetting by water droplets. This concept of zwitter-wettability is further extended to wet-style superhydrophobic coatings which simultaneously exhibit antifogging, antireflective, and self-cleaning properties. Moreover, the design principles of hydrophilic reservoir with frost and fouling-resistant capabilities is presented by redefining the hydrophilicity as the extent of a film to strongly bind with water molecules in a nonfreezable state.

Design of heterostructured films for next generation antifogging coatings

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ACS Fall 2022

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