Facile construction of stable hydrophobic surface via covalent self-assembly of silane-terminated fluorinated polymer

A facile strategy was developed to construct stable hydrophobic surface via the covalent self-assembly of silane-terminated fluorinated polymer as surface-attached polymer, which was synthesized by the free radical polymerization of 2-(perfluorohexyl)ethyl methacrylate (FOL) with γ-mercaptopropyltrimethoxysilane (MPS) as chain transfer agent. The synthesis condition for the silane-terminated fluorinated polymer (f-PFOL) and coating condition for the covalent hydrophobic coating on the Silicon (Si100) wafer were optimized with the static contact angle analysis, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) measurements. The surface-free energies (γ s ) was stable at around 9.5 mJ/m 2 after washing off the non-functionalized poly(2-(perfluorohexyl)ethyl methacrylate) (PFOL), with the f-PFOL/PFOL mixture solution concentration higher than 0.045 g/mL. The proposed approach provides a universally applicable coating technique for the stable hydrophobic surface on various substrates.