Molds, dies, and related tooling are used to shape many of the plastic and metal components we use everyday at home and work. Traditional mold-making practices are labor and capital equipment intensive,involving multiple machining, benching and heat treatment operations.Spray forming is an alternative method to manufacture molds and dies. The general concept is to atomizeand deposit droplets of a tooling alloy onto a pattern to form a thick deposit while imaging the pattern’sshape, surface texture and details. Unlike conventional machining, this approach can be used to fabricatetooling with micro-scale surface features. This paper describes a research effort to spray form molds anddies that are used to image micro-scale surface textures into polymers. The goal of the study is to replicatetextures that give rise to superhydrophobic behavior by mimicking the surface structure of highly waterrepellent biological materials such as the lotus plant. Spray conditions leading to high transfer fidelity offeatures into the surface of molded polymers will be described. Improvement in water repellency of thesematerials was quantified by measuring the static contact angle of water droplets on flat and texturedsurfaces.
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