SPP 2171 - Subproject: Structure-Property Relations and Wetting Dynamics of Organic Thin Films with Photo-Switches

Basic data for this project

Description

Smart surfaces that can reversibly change their wetting properties are of great interest for applications such as self-cleaning surfaces, microfluidics or tunable lenses just to mention a few. However, even for passive surfaces that do not change their molecular properties when broad in contact with a liquid, a quantitative description the wetting dynamics is still a challenging issue. That is in particularly true when changes on the molecular scale due to adaptation of the substrate in different chemical environments or due to photo-switching of the substrate need to be taken into account as well. For that reason, we believe that an understanding of the wetting dynamics of photo-switchable substrates requires molecular level information on the substrate dynamics and structure changes under different light conditions as well as different chemical environments. In order to resolve the latter we propose to perform characterizations and analysis on different length scales, where both molecular structure changes as well as mesoscopic and macroscopic properties are addressed and correlated.