TY - JOUR
T1 - Scalable Slippery Omniphobic Covalently Attached Liquid Coatings for Flow Fouling Reduction
AU - Zhao, Hanyang
AU - Khodakarami, Siavash
AU - Deshpande, Chirag Anand
AU - Ma, Jingcheng
AU - Wu, Qiyuan
AU - Sett, Soumyadip
AU - Miljkovic, Nenad
N1 - Funding Information:
We acknowledge support from the Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) under the U.S. Department of Energy, through the grant DE-EE0008312. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding support from the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Center (ACRC), an NSF founded I/UCRC at UIUC. N.M. gratefully acknowledges funding support from the International Institute for Carbon Neutral Energy Research (WPI-I2CNER), sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and focused ion beam milling was carried out in part in the Materials Research Laboratory Central Facilities, University of Illinois.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 American Chemical Society.
PY - 2021/8/18
Y1 - 2021/8/18
N2 - Fouling and accretion have negative impacts on a plethora of processes. To mitigate heterogeneous nucleation of a foulant, lowering the surface energy and reducing surface roughness are desired. Here, we develop a multilayer coating to mitigate solution-based heterogeneous fouling for internal flows. The first layer is a sol-gel silicon dioxide (SiO2) coating, which acts as a corrosion barrier, creates the surface chemistry needed for covalent bonding of the slippery omniphobic covalently attached liquid (SOCAL), and ensures an atomically smooth (<1 nm) interface. The second layer bonded to SiO2 is SOCAL, which further reduces the nucleation rate due to its low surface energy (<12 mJ/m2). The presence of a consistent sol-gel SiO2 base coating to bind to the SOCAL enables application to various metallic substrates. The coating is solid, making it more durable when compared to alternative slippery liquid-infused surfaces (LIS) that suffer from lubricant loss. To demonstrate performance and scalability, we apply our coating to the internal walls of aluminum (Al) tubing and test its fouling performance in a flow-fouling setup with single-phase flow of synthetic seawater. The seawater consists of saturated calcium sulfide (CaSO4), and fouling is characterized in both laminar and turbulent flow regimes (Reynolds numbers 1030 to 9300). Our coating demonstrated a reduction in salt scale fouling by 95% when compared to uncoated Al tubes. Furthermore, we show our coating to withstand turbulent flow conditions, mechanical abrasion loading, and corrosive environments for durations much longer than LIS. Our work demonstrates a coating methodology applicable to a variety of metal substrates and internal passages to achieve antifouling in single-phase flows.
AB - Fouling and accretion have negative impacts on a plethora of processes. To mitigate heterogeneous nucleation of a foulant, lowering the surface energy and reducing surface roughness are desired. Here, we develop a multilayer coating to mitigate solution-based heterogeneous fouling for internal flows. The first layer is a sol-gel silicon dioxide (SiO2) coating, which acts as a corrosion barrier, creates the surface chemistry needed for covalent bonding of the slippery omniphobic covalently attached liquid (SOCAL), and ensures an atomically smooth (<1 nm) interface. The second layer bonded to SiO2 is SOCAL, which further reduces the nucleation rate due to its low surface energy (<12 mJ/m2). The presence of a consistent sol-gel SiO2 base coating to bind to the SOCAL enables application to various metallic substrates. The coating is solid, making it more durable when compared to alternative slippery liquid-infused surfaces (LIS) that suffer from lubricant loss. To demonstrate performance and scalability, we apply our coating to the internal walls of aluminum (Al) tubing and test its fouling performance in a flow-fouling setup with single-phase flow of synthetic seawater. The seawater consists of saturated calcium sulfide (CaSO4), and fouling is characterized in both laminar and turbulent flow regimes (Reynolds numbers 1030 to 9300). Our coating demonstrated a reduction in salt scale fouling by 95% when compared to uncoated Al tubes. Furthermore, we show our coating to withstand turbulent flow conditions, mechanical abrasion loading, and corrosive environments for durations much longer than LIS. Our work demonstrates a coating methodology applicable to a variety of metal substrates and internal passages to achieve antifouling in single-phase flows.
KW - fouling
KW - heat exchanger
KW - laminar
KW - nucleation
KW - scaling
KW - sol-gel
KW - turbulent
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U2 - 10.1021/acsami.1c08845
DO - 10.1021/acsami.1c08845
M3 - Article
C2 - 34351733
AN - SCOPUS:85113779785
SN - 1944-8244
VL - 13
SP - 38666
EP - 38679
JO - ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
JF - ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
IS - 32
ER -