Plasma surface engineering technologies recently present an advance in specific surface functionalization of polymer materials, such as the plasma treatment by a reactive or inert gas and the synthesis of plasma polymer coatings from a precursor. Maskless plasma nanotexturing of polymer substrates leads to the formation of various functional nanotextures exemplified by flexible nanowires, rigid nanopillars, slender nanohairs, nanocones and large nanobundles, etc. Plasma polymerization is an efficient one-step process to fabricate new surfaces with controlled amounts of specific chemical functionality at the outer surface of material. Plasma technologies also are flexibly utilized to endow specific biomimetic functionalities on polymer surfaces.

Cold-Spray is a low-temperature method that can both modify and coat a surface via a high-velocity jet of solid-phase particles. The method been shown to be capable of both preparing and coating the lower surface of a nuclear reactor to enhance the formation of vapor microjets and improve the Critical Heat Flux (CHF), thus avoiding boiling crises during emergency external cooling. Microporous coatings were created by spraying a binary mixture with the sacrificial element then etched away. Quenching experiments on uncoated and coated surfaces showed that CHF values for the coated vessel developed faster and were consistently higher.

The oblique angle deposition technique, based on directing a vapor flux towards a substrate with the trajectory of adatoms not parallel to the substrate normal, has been demonstrated as a method capable of generating nanostructured thin films. Sequential substrate movements can be used to shape the morphology of the thin films. The conformal-evaporated-film-by-rotation technique, which has evolved from the oblique angle deposition technique, was initially developed to fabricate high-fidelity replicas of biotemplates with features on the micron- and nanoscales distributed over a curved surface. This technique has been demonstrated to be effective in several fields ranging from photonics to forensics.

The tilted-nanohair arrays (TNAs) and tilted-Janusian-nanohair arrays (TJNAs) with the structural and chemical asymmetries are fabricated using a facile two-step process combining Faraday-cage-assisted plasma nanotexturing and plasma polymerization. The directional liquid transport (DLT) against the tilt direction of nanohair and in the reverse direction is achieved on TNAs and TJNAs, respectively. A two-dimension model involving the asymmetric geometry of tilted nanohairs and the related imbibition priority of water meniscus in the inter-nanohair spaces is presented to predict the preferential direction of liquid spreading. Channels with TNAs and TJNAs can be fabricated for exquisite flow control in diverse functional fluidic devices.

Additive manufacturing makes it possible to make materials without unique morphological characteristics. Textured surfaces are of great interests in interactive environments. In particular, understanding the effects of 3D printed surfaces on cell adhesion is important for development of implantable devices. In this presentation, we discuss about the surface profile and porosity of 3D printed stainless steel. Morphological parameters and the effects of porosity on bacterial cell growth will be presented.

Surface finishing processes consume 20–70% of the cycle time of the emerging additive manufacturing process chains. Effective representations of the spatiotemporal evolution of the surface morphology are imperative for developing monitoring schemes to arrest cycle time overruns. We present a thermodynamically consistent random planar graph representation to monitor, via in situ imaging, the spatiotemporal evolution of surface morphology during finishing processes. Experimental investigations into the finishing of electron beam printed Ti-6Al-4V components to Sa < 20 nm roughness suggest that the proposed representation captures the complex interflow among neighboring asperities during finishing, and establishes a radically new endpoint criterion, i.e., surface quality improves only until each asperity interflows with six neighbors.