Conductive polyimide coatings for passive lunar dust mitigation

The significant impact of lunar dust on lunar exploration severely limits prospects for ongoing missions. To combat this, surfaces able to mitigate dust adhesion and build up are highly sought after, with passive mitigation methods such as the application of surface coatings being attractive due to their ease of incorporation and low impact on payload mass. Here, we produce thermally stable, conductive, superhydrophobic PI-based coatings and evaluate the effect on lunar dust simulant adhesion. The samples produced exhibit superhydrophobicity (water contact angle up to 156°), low surface energy (down to 4.2 mN/m) and a range of surface roughness values (from S q = 47.4 ± 11.9 nm to 471.1 ± 82.9 nm). The addition of multiwalled carbon nanotubes imparts conductivity (up to 1.86 ± 0.08 S/cm) and high performing samples exhibited extremely low dust mass retention after manual tilting to 90° (0.47 ± 0.18%) and even less after applying stimuli (down to 0% remaining dust by mass). Microscopic analysis revealed exceptionally low contamination by residual dust coverage as low as 0.007 ± 0.011%. This work identifies promising coating formulations for the mitigation of lunar dust adhesion.