Slippery surfaces: A decade of progress

Abstract

Slippery surfaces have received great attention for more than a quarter-century. In particular, during the last decade, interest has increased exponentially, resulting in thousands of articles concerning three types of slippery surfaces: superhydrophobic, superoleophobic, and omniphobic. This review focuses on recent developments and significant findings in naturally inspired slippery surfaces. Superhydrophobicity can be characterized by water droplets beading on a surface at significantly high static contact angles and low contact-angle hystereses. Microscopically rough hydrophobic surfaces could entrap air in their pores, resulting in a portion of a submerged surface with an air-water interface, which is responsible for the slip effect and drag reduction. Suberhydrophobicity enhances the mobility of droplets on lotus leaves for self-cleaning purposes, the so-called lotus effect. Surface hydrophobicity can be advanced to repel low-surface-tension liquids, i.e., become superoleophobic. Another kind of slippery coating is the slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces (SLIPS), which are omniphobic coatings. Certain plants such as the carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher inspired SLIPS. Their interior surfaces have microstructural roughness, which can lock in place an infused lubricating liquid. The lubricant is then utilized as a repellent surface for other liquids or substances such as water, blood, crude oil, ice, insects, and bio-fouling. In this review, we discuss different slippery mechanisms in nature. We also cover recent advances in manufacturing, texturing, and controlling slippery surface at the micro- and nanoscales. We further discuss the performance, sustainability, and longevity of such surfaces under different environmental conditions. Very-recent techniques used to characterize the surfaces are also detailed.