A facile and scalable approach to tear-and-use polyethylene (PE) tape with adjustable hydrophobicity for water transferring

Despite the refined microstructures for liquid manipulation materials is hard to be readily and massively fabricate, the damage and abrasion during storage and transportation is still a main factor limiting its service life. Herein, a facile, scalable, and eco-friendly approach to superhydrophobic polyethylene (PE) tape via constructing polypropylene (PP)-PE-PP sandwiched structures with multi-melt multi-injection molding was reported. The PE tape can be long-term protected by PP layer before use. By peeling the protective PP layers from the PE tape, the hydrophobicity can be instantly endowed to the peeled PE surface, which should give credit is the failure of the interphase layer between PE and PP, followed by in-situ formation of multi-tier microstructures of the peeled PE surface during the peeling process. The hydrophobic performance can be regulated up to 154.0 ± 8.99° by optimizing PE chain structure. Moreover, by simply tunning the peeling temperature from −198 °C to 110 °C, the PE tunable water contact angle (WCA) ranges from 133.6 ± 4.39° to utmost 156.3 ± 3.57°, owing to the transformation of hierarchical multi-tier surface topography around the transition temperature (EP). Ultimately, the as-prepared hydrophobic PE tapes were successfully utilized for loss-free manipulation and transferring of the water droplet, which provides a significant prospect of eco-friendly and continuous production for durable hydrophobic materials.