Water-Repellent Galvanized Steel Surfaces Obtained by Sintering of Zinc Nanopowder Montes Ruiz-Cabello, Francisco Javier Fusco, Schon Ibáñez Ibáñez, Pablo Cabrerizo Vílchez, Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Valverde, Miguel Ángel Galvanized steel surfaces are widely used in industry as a solution to prevent corrosion of steel tools that operate in outdoor or corrosive and oxidative environments. These objects are coated with a zinc protective layer deposited by hot dip galvanization. Turning the surface of galvanized steel tools into superhydrophobic may lead to very useful functionalities, although it may be a difficult task, because the preservation of the thin zinc layer is a claim. We propose herein the use of a bottom-up approach based on sandblasting, followed by sintering of zinc nanoparticles on the galvanized steel substrate, which allowed us to produce a zinc-made hierarchical structure required for superhydrophobicity. These samples acquired a double-scale structure that led to superhydrophobicity when they were later hydrophobized with a thin fluoropolymer layer. We found that sandblasting might be useful but not mandatory, unlike the sintering process, which was essential to reach superhydrophobicity. We found that, under certain experimental conditions, the surfaces showed outstanding water-repellent properties. We observed that the sandblasting on galvanized steel caused more damage than the sintering process. Sintering of low-melting-point metal nanoparticles was revealed as a promising strategy to fabricate functional metallic surfaces. 2023-05-23T08:49:31Z 2023-05-23T08:49:31Z 2023-04-05 journal article Langmuir 2023, 39, 15, 5469–5476[https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.langmuir.3c00182?urlappend=%3Fref%3DPDF&jav=VoR&rel=cite-as] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/81741 10.1021/acs.langmuir.3c00182?urlappend=%3Fref%3DPDF&jav=VoR&rel=cite-as eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/European Union’s Horizon 2020/955612 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ open access Atribución 4.0 Internacional ACS Publications