Multiresponsive Wettability Switching on Polymer Surface: Effect of Surface Chemistry and/or Morphology Tuning

The design of responsive surfaces with reversible and fast wettability switching by external control represents one of the most urgent challenges in the surface and interfaces sciences. Especially surfaces responding to more than one stimulus are expected to find even broader range of applications. In this paper, a multiresponsive polymer surface is proposed and investigated that is able to respond to the pH, temperature, and electric field. The surface triggering is subdivided into chemically-based (pH and temperature) and morphologically-based (application of electric field). The various combinations of three external triggering are applied separately, conjunctively, or adversarily for detailed investigation of their joint action effect. It is found that the most significant changes in wettability switching are achieved by the simultaneous combination of the reversible chemistry and morphology switching. Oppositely, the utilization of the wettability switching through the combination of chemical stimuli produces negative interference of surface response, with the suppression of stimuli efficiency.