Gentle fabrication of colorful superhydrophobic bamboo based on metal-organic framework

The efficient use of abundant renewable bamboo as high value-added decoration and building materials is of great significance for mitigating carbon dioxide emissions and maintaining sustainable development. The key challenge is to explore efficient and gentle methods to improve the undesirable surface properties of bamboo. Herein, a colorful and superhydrophobic bamboo is gently fabricated by a facile in-situ growth and conversion method based on metal-organic framework (for constructing micro-nano composite structures) and subsequent coating of sodium laurate (for reducing surface energy) at room temperature. The resulting sodium laurate-coated cobalt-nickel double hydroxide layer (CoNi-DH-La) is demonstrated as an efficient superhydrophobic layer to exhibit excellent chemical and mechanical stability. Impressively, the as-obtained CoNi-DH-La-coated bamboo sheet (BS-CoNi-DH-La) shows positive performances in terms of mildew resistance, flame retardancy, and self-cleaning. More importantly, this gentle method can endow bamboo with multiple unfading colors by changing the type of inorganic salts during the preparation process and display good potential for large-scale production.