Fabrication and Wettability Analysis of Hydrophobic Stainless Steel Surfaces With Microscale Structures From Nanosecond Laser Machining

Abstract

In this work, nanosecond laser machining is used to fabricate hydrophobic 17-4 PH stainless steel surfaces with microscale and submicron structures. Four surface structures were designed, with microscale channels and pillars (100 μm pitch size) of uniform heights (100 μm) or alternating heights (between 100 μm and 50 μm). During fabrication, the high-power laser beams also created submicron features on top of the microscale ones, leading to hierarchical, multiscale surface structures. Detailed wettability analysis was conducted on the fabricated samples. Measured static contact angles of water on these surfaces are over 130 deg without any coating, compared to ∼70 deg on the original steel surface before laser machining. Slightly lower contact angle hysteresis was also observed on the laser machined surfaces. Overall, these results agree with a simple Cassie–Baxter model for wetting that assumes only fractional surface area contact between the droplet and the surface. This work demonstrates that steel surfaces machined with relatively inexpensive nanosecond laser can achieve excellent hydrophobicity even with simple microstructural designs.