Superhydrophobic Conductive Materials: System Design, Processing Adjustment, and Promising Applications

The working efficiency, reliability, and stability of electronic materials and devices in real environments often face challenges from humid conditions, aging, mildew, chemical damage (especially corrosion), and physical damage (like freezing and abrasion). To address these issues, endowing conductive materials with bionic superhydrophobicity offers promising solutions by providing them with wet-resistant, antifreezing, anticorrosion, antifouling, and other functions. Through different methods including immersion, coating, spraying, solvothermal reaction, and layer-by-layer (LBL) self-assembly, etching and screen printing, etc., superhydrophobic conductive materials (SCMs) exhibiting surface wettability with contact angles exceeding 150° and typical electrical conductivity over 10-6 S/cm level, have been processed into various forms such as coatings, films, foams, aerogels, elastomer and so on. They have realized utilization not only in traditional domains like waterproofing, deicing, self-cleaning, oil/water separation, anticorrosion, electromagnetic interference shielding (EIS), sensors, and solar cells but also in emerging fields such as wearable and biomedical electronics. Herein, this review offers a comprehensive and systematic overview of promising research progress in this field. Specially, the challenge of the design and adjustment of the competitive dual functions in relation to the composition of various conductive fillers (metals, carbon-based materials, CPs, MXenes, etc.) and hydrophobic materials (polymers, fabrics, rubbers, metals, etc.) together with diverse processing and surface treating strategies is highly emphasized. Their significant potential for application in devices in line with diverse scenarios to realize multiple functions or long-term operating reliability is discussed in detail. Further exploration of surface-interface tuning mechanisms and material systems, with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI), additive manufacturing, etc., is planned to pave the way for more innovative applications across interdisciplinary fields. This review could also give insights into facing the challenge of endowing superhydrophobic materials with other photoelectromagnetic functionalities.