Superhydrophilic Antifog Glass and Quartz Induced by Plasma Treatment in Air
Huixing Zhang, Xiaolong Fang, Xiaowen Qi, Chaoran Sun, Zhenze Zhai, Longze Chen, He Wang, Qiufang Hu, Hongtao Cui, Meiyan QiuFogging on glass poses a severe challenge in daily life, potentially even becoming life-threatening during driving and surgery; therefore there is a need for antifog surface structures. Fabricating superhydrophilic surfaces has been one of the major solutions to the challenge. Conventional direct thermal annealing glass in a furnace at 900 K for 2 h led to superhydrophicity but failed to produce superhydrophilicity on quartz. Meanwhile, it degraded transmission and was low throughput. This study developed a programmed fast plasma treatment of planar soda-lime glass and quartz in air, applied for only a few seconds, that was able to fabricate superhydrophilic surfaces. The process led to a 0° contact angle without sacrificing transmission, a result unreported before. The plasma treatment covered a whole 30 × 30 cm2 substrate in only approximately 5 s, resulting in superhydrophilicity, which has rarely been reported before. This simple yet controllable process has great potential for further scale-up and practical applications.