A facile method to fabricate surfaces showing superhydrophilicity in air and superhydrophobicity in oil

The changes of the wettability of the solid surfaces have attracted massive attention due to their important practical implications in numerous fields. As a new subject, the research on the wettability under the different environments is still in its early stage. So the fundamental research must be performed for the practical applications under different environments. However, it is seldom that the comprehensive wettability of a surface in air, in water and in oil has been reported. In this paper, the authors investigated the wettability of the stainless steel mesh coated with polyurethane in the above three different environments. The surface of the uncoated mesh was found to be hydrophobic in air, but the surface of the coated mesh was superhydrophilic in air. More interestingly, the surfaces of the coated meshes were superoleophilic in water and superhydrophobic in oil. Due to the coated meshes with these wettabilities were fabricated via a facile two-step method, the presented method may be adopted for large-scale industrial production, in various fields, such as icing prevention or the oil-field industry.