Patent ID: 7452605

Claim:
An article superior in slipping a waterdrop down a surface of said article, said article comprising: a substrate; a functional film formed on a surface of said substrate, and an underlayer arranged between said substrate and said functional film, said underlayer comprising a metal oxide; wherein said article is prepared by a process comprising the steps of: (a) subjecting an alkoxysilane to hydrolysis and polycondensation in the presence of an acid catalyst, thereby preparing a silica precursor sol for forming a silica matrix in the functional film; (b) mixing together an alkoxy group-terminated, dimethyl silicone represented by the formula [1] and said silica precursor sol, thereby preparing a coating liquid; where each of Y 1 and Y 2 is independently a bivalent alkylene group, —(CH 2 ) i —NH—CO—O—, or oxygen; R is a monovalent alkyl group; i is 0 or a positive integer; each of p and q is an integer of 1-3 independently; and n is an integer of not greater than 2,000, (c) applying said coating liquid to said surface of said substrate, thereby forming thereon a precursory film; and (d) drying said precursory film into said functional film, wherein said alkoxy group-terminated, dimethyl silicone of step (b) has an average polymerization degree of 5-400.