Superhydrophobic coatings by the hot embossing approach: recent developments and state-of-art applications

Over the past few decades, superhydrophobic coatings (SHCs) are the main attraction for scientists and researchers due to their various applications in different fields, such as textiles, optical devices, sensors, energy sectors, self-cleaning coatings, and anti-corrosion coatings. Several techniques such as chemical vapor deposition (CVD), layer-by-layer deposition (LBL), wet chemical method, photolithography, laser ablation, micro-milling, and electrochemical deposition were tried out in past to fabricate SHCs. Most of the processes are expensive, slow, prone to error, and only limited are suitable for creating patterns on polymeric substrates. However, the hot embossing (HE) technique can overcome all such issues. The HE technique is one of the most promising methods because of its great potential for replicating micro-nanofeatures on polymeric surfaces. High-quality micro-nanofeatures are highly required for SHCs that can be easily produced on a mass scale using the HE technique. The literature is full of review papers on HE techniques and their applications, but no review article is available on HE-operated polymeric SHCs. This review article is focused on the recent advancements in HE-operated polymeric SHCs and their state-of-art applications.