Continuous Fabrication of Parallel Micro‐Sheet Decorated Fibers for Ultrafast Fog Harvesting

ABSTRACT

Uneven fibers decorated with micro‐patterns on their surface have drawn more interest due to their fascinating properties. Aligned micro‐patterns parallel to the fiber's axial direction have been easily fabricated because of the directional stress that is strictly parallel to the fiber's axial direction induced by thermal‐drawing or melt spinning, whereas continuous fabrication of micro‐patterns perpendicular to the fiber's axial direction remains a huge challenge. In this work, the extrusion molding method is employed to continuously fabricate HDPE fiber decorated with parallel micro‐sheets (HFPS) yet perpendicular to the fiber's axial direction. These plate‐like micro‐sheets’ spacing, thickness, and height are in micron‐scale, on which there exist numerous lamellar crystals in nano‐scale. The as‐fabricated fiber shows excellent hydrophobicity, high adhesion to water as well as long‐term underwater repellency. More interestingly, upon a certain strain, plate‐like micro‐sheets can be transformed into S‐shaped (HFSS) ones but still parallel with each other. Compared with the reported uneven fibers decorated with micro‐patterns, such fiber shows the ultrafast fog harvesting (10.3 g·cm ⁻² ·h ⁻¹ ). This work follows the concept of “functionalized processing for thermoplastics” to continuously fabricated thermoplastic fiber decorated with parallel micro‐sheets perpendicular to the fiber's axial direction, offering new prospects for expanding the application scope of thermoplastics.