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Wetting

Unobtrusive graphene coatings

Nature Materials volume 11, pages 182–183 (2012)Cite this article

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The contact angle of water drops on substrates for which the wettability is dominated by van der Waals forces remains unchanged when the substrates are coated with a monolayer of graphene. Such 'wetting transparency' could lead to superior conducting and hydrophobic graphene-coated surfaces with tunable electronic properties.

What makes graphene so interesting for wetting? Most of the excitement about the material is related to its extraordinary electronic, mechanical and optical properties. With high-quality graphene becoming available as a large-area coating, other aspects such as its macroscopic stability and its interaction with fluids become increasingly interesting. For example, how does the contact angle on graphene coatings evolve with the number of coated layers, and how many layers does it take to reach the contact angle for bulk graphite? Rafiee and co-authors addressed both questions by depositing graphene onto various substrates with intrinsic water contact angles ranging from approximately 20° to 85°. For 4–6 graphene layers, all drops displayed the typical contact angle of bulk graphite, approximately 90°, a result that the authors confirmed with molecular dynamics simulations.

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Figure 1: Graphene's wetting transparency.

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  1. Frieder Mugele is at the MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology, University of Twente, 7500 AE Enschede, the Netherlands,

    Frieder Mugele

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  1. Frieder Mugele
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Correspondence to Frieder Mugele.

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The author declares no competing financial interests.

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Mugele, F. Unobtrusive graphene coatings. Nature Mater 11, 182–183 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3259

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