Advanced Self-Cleaning Surfaces

Dear Colleagues,

We would like to draw your attention to a new interdisciplinary topic dedicated to advanced self-cleaning surfaces. Self-cleaning effects can be utilized in a variety of applications, from cleaner building surfaces to anti-fogging mirrors, low-drag ship hulls, anti-bacterial and anti-viral surfaces, and food container draining. The methods used to achieve self-cleaning are diverse, and all rely on tuning wettability, meaning that either the surface chemistry or morphology, or both, are modified to make surfaces superhydrophilic, superhydrophobic, amphiphilic, or oleophobic. Wettability changes can be permanent or induced by an external stimulus, as in the case of photoinduced phenomena. Nature is often the key: most modifications currently adopted are actually bioinspired—e.g., by lotus leaves, shark skin, or mosquito eyes, to name a few. This interdisciplinary topic aims to collect all possible approaches to self-cleaning, including theoretical approaches as well as small-scale laboratory experiments and material validation in relevant environments from the nanometer to meter scale. Joining all aspects of such a faceted phenomenon in a single collection of articles will help the scientific community involved in this field to improve collaboration among diverse disciplines and promote novel insights across interdisciplinary research fields. To take into account its peculiar interdisciplinary character, this article collection will be published in five different journals: Coatings, Materials, Membranes, Nanomaterials, and Surfaces.

Prof. Dr. Maria Vittoria Diamanti
Prof. Dr. Massimiliano D'Arienzo
Prof. Dr. Carlo Antonini
Dr. Michele Ferrari
Topic Editors