Molecular Structure of Omniphobic, Surface‐Grafted Polydimethylsiloxane Chains
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The unique surface properties of grafted polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) chains, particularly their omniphobicity and low friction, are influenced by molecular structure and tethering density. Despite molecularly smoothness and homogeneity, these surfaces exhibit significant variability in wettability and contact angle hysteresis (CAH). This work uncovers the molecular structure of grafted PDMS chains. Grafted PDMS chains synthesized using a difunctional chlorosilane initiator, which exhibits CAH <2° on silicon wafers, adopt a brush‐to‐mushroom conformation with a molecular weight ≈7,800 g mol −1 , a grafting density of 0.22 ± 0.4 chains nm −2 , and a thickness of ≈3 nm. Each PDMS chain terminates with a silanol group, and ≈96% of substrate silanols remain unreacted. The presence of these terminal silanols is confirmed with time‐of‐flight secondary ion mass spectroscopy, as is their removal when exchanged for trimethylsilyl groups, both on the substrate and terminating the PDMS chains. Quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation measurements show that this “capping” procedure exchanges ≈1.5 silanols nm −2 ; capping occurs at the substrate and PDMS chain end. The findings suggest that grafted, capped PDMS chains of this molecular weight are able to achieve excellent omniphobic properties even when the majority of surface silanols remain unreacted, which may aid in the design of future omniphobic materials.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".