Electrowetting is a widely used and effective method to tune the wettability of ionic liquids at solid-liquid interfaces, but it usually requires an external electric field. Here, we proposed a strategy for conveniently tuning ionic liquid wettability by adopting ferroelectric LiNbO3 single crystals as functional substrates. A heating pretreatment process was applied to modulate the surface charge characteristics of LiNbO3 substrates, leading to an improved wettability of [EMIM][BF4] and [EMIM][NTf2] on the LiNbO3 substrates with both positively poled (+Z) and negatively poled (-Z) surfaces. This work may be of great interest in the field of ferroelectric-based microelectronics.
Keywords: ferroelectrics; interfaces; ionic liquids; surface charge characteristics; wettability.