Latest Hydrophobe Stories

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online A spritz of dew drops is all the cicadas on the East Coast need to keep their wings fresh and clean as they emerge from their 17-year slumber. A research team from the universities of Duke and James Cook revealed dew drops are beneficial not only in cleaning cicada wings, but other water-repellant, or superhydrophobic, surfaces as well. Dew drops “jump” by themselves on such surfaces, carrying away contaminants. Chuan-Hua...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Surfaces that can shed water and survive harsh environments could have broad applications in a wide range of industries including energy, water, transportation, construction and medicine. The condensation of water is an integral part of many industrial processes, for example, and most electric power plants and desalination plants have condensers. Materials that prevent water from spreading over a surface – hydrophobic materials -...

Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne Water repelling molecules are said to be hydrophobic. The hydration – or formation of water interfaces around hydrophobic molecules – is important for many biological processes: protein folding, membrane formation, transport of proteins across an interface, the transmission of action potentials across membranes. It is involved as well in the process of creating mayonnaise, or in the fact that you can get rid of fat with soap. Hydrophobic...

The wetting model is a classical problem in surface science and biomimetic science. Professor LIU Jianlin and his collaborators from China University of Petroleum, Wuhan University and Fourth Military Medical University approached this old and classical problem from a new direction. They stressed that it is the triple contact line and not the contact area of the droplet/solid interface that determines the macroscopic contact angle. The proposed continuum model, termed the mechanism-based...

Jedidiah Becker for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Color is all around us - from painted buildings, to stop signs, to butterfly wings. Traditionally, colorful compounds, called pigments, are added to material to give them the desired color. However, color can often fade and is susceptible to damage from environmental conditions, like rain. A more novel way to create color is to synthesize polymers to create surface types and colors for specific applications. However, creating such...

Jedidiah Becker for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online Read my exclusive interview with Professor Shu Yang about her research. Have you ever looked at a peacock’s feathers, a butterfly’s wing or an oily puddle on the road and wondered why they have those shimmering, vibrant colors? Unlike the colors you see in spring grass, an animals’ fur or fading autumn leaves, these iridescent hues are not the result of pigmentation but rather of a naturally occurring phenomenon known as...

Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online [ Watch the Video: Superhydrophobic Droplet Logic: Flip-Flop Memory ] Aalto University researchers are using water droplets as bits of digital information to create a new way of computing. The new concept was made possible through the discovery that upon collision with each other on a highly water-repellant surface, two water droplets rebound like billiard balls. The team wrote in the journal Advanced Materials that they have...

Inspired by the water-repellent properties of the lotus leaf, a group of scientists in China has discovered a way to impart a fog-free, self-cleaning finish to glass and other transparent materials. "Superhydrophobic" surfaces, such as the lotus leaf, are excellent at repelling water and also boast other "smart" self-cleaning, anti-glare, anti-icing, and anti-corrosion properties. By using hollow silica nanoparticles that resemble raspberries, scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences...

The water boatman's unique propulsion system was studied by researchers from China Superhydrophobicity is one of most important interfacial properties between solids and liquids. SHI Yanlong and his group from the College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Key laboratory of Hexi Corridor Resources Utilization of Gansu Universities, Hexi University investigated the superhydrophobicity of the water boatman's hind wings. The study showed that superhydrophobicity plays a crucial role in...

For many years, scientists have been pursuing ways to mimic the perplexing capability of the lotus leaf to repel water. Lotus leaves hate water so much that droplets effortlessly roll off the surface, keeping it clean from dirt. Now an international team of researchers led by Aalto University have come up with an entirely new concept of writing and displaying information on surfaces using simply water. They exploit the unique way a trapped layer of air behaves on a lotus-inspired...