Extreme Anti-Scaling Performance of Slippery Omniphobic Covalently Attached Liquids

Scale formation presents an enormous cost to the global economy. Classical nucleation theory dictates that to reduce the heterogeneous nucleation of scale, the surface should have low surface energy, and be as smooth as possible. Past approaches have focused on lowering surface energy, creating atomically smooth interfaces, or both, via the infusion of low surface energy lubricants into rough superhydrophobic substrates. Although lubricant-based surfaces are promising, lubricant drainage inhibits their utilization. Here, we develop methodologies to deposit slippery omniphobic covalently attached liquids (SOCAL) on arbitrary substrates. Similar to lubricant-based surfaces, SOCAL have ultra-low roughness and surface energy, enabling low nucleation rates, and eliminating the need to replenish the lubricant. To enable SOCAL coating on metals, we investigated the surface chemistry required to ensure high quality functionalization as measured by ultra-low contact angle hysteresis (< 2°). Using multi-layer depos...