(129e) Engineering Chemically Hierarchical Surfaces With Superior Antifouling and Self-Cleaning Properties

Surfaces simultaneously bearing antifouling and self-cleaning abilities are broadly employed by living systems to sustain diverse powerful functions. Integrating these features into synthetic surfaces emerges is highly desirable and critically important in the development of various advanced surface-relevant technologies during medical, industrial, and environmental applications. We report here an in situ strategy to engineer amphiphilic porous membrane surfaces by free and forced surface segregation of amphiphilic polymer with low surface energy components: During the traditional nonsolvent induced phase inversion, hydrophilic segments freely segregate to the membrane surface controlled by the self-organization to minimize the interfacial between hydrophobic surfaces and water, and the non-polar hydrophobic segments are spontaneously dragged onto membrane surfaces by hydrophilic segments via forced surface segregation. The resulting external surface covered with hydrophilic and low surface energy polymer brushes can endow membranes with superior antifouling (fouling-resistant) and self-cleaning (fouling-release) abilities. When utilized for wastewater treatment, both irreversible and reversible membrane fouling by typical foulants, such as oil, protein and microorganism, can be remarkably suppressed. Hydrophilic brushes generate hydration layers constructing a protective screen to reduce the direct interaction between foulants and membrane surfaces, endowing the surface superior antifouling ability; low surface energy brushes form amounts of non-adhesive microdomians on the membrane surfaces to minimize the intermolecular forces of interactions between the foulants and the membrane surface, rendering the surfaces with desirable self-cleaning ability.