Functional soft-nanoimprinted surfaces
Isabel Rodríguez IMDEA Nanociencia C/ Faraday 9. 28049 Madrid, Spain
The ability to produce specific surface nanopatterns even on passive materials like consumer plastics has opened up the possibility to provide to these materials with additional properties from those offered by the bulk material itself and as such, new functionalities can be derived from them.
A technology that is well suited to create functional surfaces on polymeric materials is nanoimprint lithography (NIL). During the lecture, I will initially present a general overview of the basic NIL principles including the different process variations, placing special emphasis on soft thermal nanoimprint lithography (T-NIL) as enabling technology to create complex surface nanofeatures [1] and its up-scaled processing via roll to roll NIL on flexible substrates [2].
On the second part of the lecture I will present examples of soft T-NIL processes using various materials to produce functional surfaces for applications such as nano-structured antireflective surfaces, superhydrophobic, self-cleaning surfaces or surfaces with antibacterial properties [2, 4].
[1] Book Nanofabrication: nanolithography techniques and their applications, J. M. De Teresa (editor), Chapter 7, Institute of Physics, UK (2020).
[2] Jacobo-Martín et al., Sci Rep 11, 2419 (2021).
[3] Navarro-Baena et al., Nanoscale, 10(33), 15496-15504. (2018).
[4] Viela et al., Bioinspir Biomim., 13(2), 026011 (2018)
Isabel Rodríguez is a Senior Research Professor at IMDEA-Nanoscience since 2013. Before she worked at the Institute of Materials Research and Engineering (IMRE), A*STAR in Singapore where she was a senior member of the Patterning and Fabrication Group. She holds a Pharmacy degree from the University of Alcalá de Henares and a Science PhD from the National University of Singapore.
Her research work is focused in areas related to the application of soft nanofabrication technologies to develop functional and biomimetic surfaces for the control of interfacial interactions, wettability, cell adhesion or optical phenomena.
http://nanociencia.imdea.org/nanostructured-functional-surfaces-program/group-home