One-step electrodeposition to fabricate superhydrophobic surfaces on flexible conductive films: Optimization of metallic compounds

Superhydrophobic surfaces were fabricated by a simple one-step electrodeposition technique to deposit three distinct micro/nano hierarchical structures of Ce, Mg, or Cu-based compounds on Ag films on a flexible polymer substrate. Scanning electron microscopy was used to examine the surface morphologies of obtained structures with different deposition. Compared with the bare Ag films, one-step electrodeposition process resulted in superhydrophobicity, including a water contact angle of 159.7° for Ce-modified surfaces, 157.0° for Mg-modified surfaces, and 153.8° for Cu-modified surfaces. Besides, these surfaces showed high thermal stability below 120 ℃, and good flexibility but low electrical conductivity . EDS and XPS results suggest the production of low surface energy materials that formed the superhydrophobic features on the Ag films. Besides, because of the formation of CeO 2 , Ce-SHS had better superhydrophobicity than Mg-SHS and Cu-SHS. In addition, the potentiodynamic polarization experiments showed that the electrodeposited superhydrophobic surfaces had lower I corr , higher E corr and impedance values in NaCl solution, Na 2 SO 4 solution and Simulated body fluid, and artificial sweat solution compared with the bare silver film, indicating that the electrodeposited protective film has good anti-corrosion properties. These results suggest that the one-step electrodeposition method is a promising strategy to fabricate conducting films with superhydrophobic surfaces for surface protection under various corrosive environments.