New "Hairy" Material Is Almost Perfectly Hydrophobic

drewsup writes "Wolfgang Sigmund, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Florida, has created a material modeled after spider hairs that acts as a nearly perfect water-repelling surface. Quoting Science Daily: 'A paper about the surface, which works equally well with hot or cold water, appears in this month's edition of the journal Langmuir. Spiders use their water-repelling hairs to stay dry or avoid drowning, with water spiders capturing air bubbles and toting them underwater to breathe. Potential applications for UF's ultra-water-repellent surfaces are many, Sigmund said. When water scampers off the surface, it picks up and carries dirt with it, in effect making the surface self-cleaning. As such, it is ideal for some food packaging, or windows, or solar cells that must stay clean to gather sunlight, he said. Boat designers might coat hulls with it, making boats faster and more efficient.' Hairy glass, anyone?"

Comments

Hydrophopic

[Stooshie]

People call me hydrophobic but it's like water off a ducks back to me.

Re:Hydrophopic

[AndrewBC]

Plus, the doctors are all quacks anyway.

Re:Hydrophopic

[shentino]

You bring up a good point about resistance versus viscous liquids, such as oil or ink or tar.

Re:Hydrophopic

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's the most racial post you've seen then you have not been here long.

I wrote that "racist" post. I'm not racist. I'm a troll. If saying "grass is green" was effective as a troll then i would say that. It isn't, so i say "nigger." It obviously worked on you, you really seem to have got your panties in a bunch over it.

Best way to deal with racism is to not take racial things so goddamned seriously. Getting so upset over it is the exact opposite of realizing that "racial" differences are superficial and don't matter because we're all human beings. If someone is discriminated against like in the workplace, by all means take action, do something about it, cuz that's just plain wrong and no, i would never do that or support someone who does that. But if someone says things that don't actually reflect how they feel about black people or any other group, just cuz you find it offensive, why get upset about that? Does it never occur to you oversensitive politically correct types that your whiney reaction is exactly what the troll is counting on?

Re:Hydrophopic

[biryokumaru]

Best way to deal with racism is to not take racial things so goddamned seriously.

Whoa, now. This is the internet. The internet is serious business.

Re:Hydrophopic

[telomerewhythere]

Actually note this from the article :

Although he hasn't published the research yet, Sigmund said a variation of the surface also repels oil, a first for the industry.

It also says that the Hydrophobic properties are based on physics alone and not chemistry. And ...

the UF surface may be the most or among the most water phobic. Close-up photographs of water droplets on dime-sized plastic squares show that the droplets maintain their spherical shape, whether standing still or moving. Droplets bulge down on most other surfaces, dragging a kind of tail as they move. Sigmund said his surface is the first to shuttle droplets with no tail.

I thought it is pretty cool stuff.

Re:Hydrophopic

[imakemusic]

I hate racism. I hate racists. Somebody ban this racist idiot please.

So...you're a racistist?

Hydrophobic

[SnuffySmith]

It has rabies?

Raw Data Video

[cyberfunk2]

Available here free of charge:

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/la903813g

Re:Raw Data Video

[cyberfunk2]

Warning.. movies appear to be in crap-tastic Indeo 5 format

Re:Gore-tex

[rolfwind]

Al Gore is not going to be happy.

Re:Gore-tex

[Hadlock]

I doubt this material "breathes" the same way gore-tex does. Enjoy your sweat bath! :)

Re:Gore-tex

[the brown guy]

just put the spider fibres on the inside of the jacket and it repels the sweat.

Probrem solved

What's in a name?

[SEWilco]

Hairy food packaging. I think someone will come up with a better name for that material.

Re:What's in a name?

[Heed00]

The beaver bag? The pelt package?

Re:What's in a name?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know... Maybe the Kiwi's have an idea?

Do boats go faster because it repels water?

[wisebabo]

Would there be a (very) thin layer of air between the boat and the water? Would there be a reduction in friction akin to the thin layer of water created when a skater's skates press down on the ice?

Or would boats go faster because no barnacles or mussels could become fastened on the hull of a boat? (I've heard that this used to be combatted with very toxic copper based compounds, no idea what they use now). If these microscopic hairs that were lifted from spiders work really well in preventing "fouling", why haven't whales evolved the same?

Just askin'.

Re:Do boats go faster because it repels water?

[Guillermito]

Since when evolution guarantees an optimal anatomical structure? If the whale body is "good enough" to survive and reproduce under the environmental conditions whales tend to live in, then why they should have evolved the same microscopic hairs that we see in spiders?

Re:Do boats go faster because it repels water?

[Anonymous Coward]

actually sharks have unidirectional scales and dolphins are hairy, neither are affected by barnacles like whales

Re:Do boats go faster because it repels water?

[anthony.vo]

Probably because barnacles evolved to attach to whales too. I'm just guessing, but the pressure for survival is probably greater for barnacles to attach to whales than for whales to get rid of barnacles, as they are not that affected by barnacles anyways.

Re:Do boats go faster because it repels water?

[rattaroaz]

Also, since when did evolution stop? Who knows if in another 100 million years, the whales may evolve microscopic hairs.

Re:Do boats go faster because it repels water?

[osu-neko]

Indeed. It's worth nothing that, relatively speaking, whales are a fairly new evolutionary development. The first whales appear on the scene a mere 50 million years ago. The other question is one of competition. Some astoundingly suboptimal, inefficient designs have survived in nature for millions of years when they lacked significant competition or pressure in their niche. Whales don't seem to face a lot of competition or pressure, even less since we thinned their numbers in recent centuries.

Long story short, whales are unlikely to be anywhere near an optimal solution for their niche, and are unlikely to become one anytime soon.

Re:Do boats go faster because it repels water?

[Shark]

(I've heard that this used to be combatted with very toxic copper based compounds, no idea what they use now).

When I worked for some ship systems company, they used the desalination slurry (byproduct of the freshwater-making systems). Basically, they made the water around the ship too salty for things to want to stick around... Literally.

Re:Do boats go faster because it repels water?

[MacOS_Rules]

Because just because you're ultra-hydrophobic, doesn't mean you're good at solving the problem of fouling.

The toxics are being phased out, but there's not much yet to replace them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofouling is a very complex subject, with a lot of research dollars behind it these days.

The skinny of it is that many proteins will expose their hydrophobic cores and thus denature onto these ultra-hydrophobic surfaces; I'd imagine these surfaces to be excellent in pure water, and terrible in anything non-ideal (aka, the ocean).

Re:Do boats go faster because it repels water?

[GooberToo]

If these microscopic hairs that were lifted from spiders work really well in preventing "fouling", why haven't whales evolved the same?

Sharks have evolved a mechanism which already works extremely well and is now actively being used for ocean faring ships. Just because sharks have evolved such a mechanism, why would you assume whales would? Besides, sharks are predatory creatures, where the extra performance is likely key to their continued success, whereas most whales which suffer from fowling are typically not predatory.

Hairy and hydrophobic...

[Anonymous Coward]

... I asked my cat and she somehow didn`t look surprised. How many lifes does this new stuff have?

Re:Inside tire treads?

[krnpimpsta]

Not to crap on your idea, but I don't think that would work. Tires are like pencil erasers. They lose material as you use them. Anything you put on the outside of a tire, that makes contact with the ground, will be rubbed off in less than a few hundred miles. For example, if you look at a new tire, it will typically have little nubs or rubber hairs all over it (these are a result of the molding process). After you drive on them for a few hundred miles, you'll see they get rubbed away/off.

We'll know how effective it is

[Sir_Real]

when the records start falling in the next olympics.

Re:We'll know how effective it is

[yariv]

No we won't, I don't think we'll see many swimming world records falling in the foreseeable future, not when we're back with normal swimsuits.

The Problem

[carp3_noct3m]

The current problem they are having with it is that it is very fragile. If they can figure out how to apply this technique and keep it durable and mass producible then this really will change a lot of things. Its also pretty interesting how they note that we imagine things like this to have some uniformity, but they found that the pattern is strangely abstract, with some fibers being curved and some not etc. Anyway, cool stuff regardless.

Hairy food packaging already exists:

[Anonymous Coward]

it's called "fur".

Sweaty, hairy, stinky people

[marciot]

Sound true enough to me. Sometimes the people who don't shower are also hairy and disgusting.

I Feel Better Already

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure all those loose broken-off nanohairs, are going to do ahhhhhh my ahhhhhtsm-heeeee ... ahzm-whiiiiiiiiifffffffffff ... asthma .... ahhhhhhh - a lot of good.

After all, they're technological. And therefore completely different from natural irritants - sucha as cat's hairs, pollen or random bursts of chelisserae (don't ask). :)

Re:I Feel Better Already

[LanMan04]

My wife really wanted a pet tarantula, but her Doctor advised against it due to the fact that she's a severe asthmatic.

Those little spiky hairs get everywhere apparently.

Nottingham Univ. super hydrophobic demo

[magus_melchior]

Here's the video. Fascinating stuff-- the first sample is a copper plate with copper oxide crystals coated in a material very similar to Teflon.

Another well known hairy material...

[dvh.tosomja]

Another well known hairy material is asbestos. Just sayin'

old news and the hype is only partly true.

[Anonymous Coward]

Superhydrophobicity by thin trapped air layers is not new at all - I recall seeing a seminar in my physics department ~10 years ago. The self-cleaning aspect does work nicely, but generally the surface structures lack the durability to last long enough to be useful. It also doesn't work for boat hulls because the air slowly dissolves into the water until the trapped air layer is lost.

Battery/Fuel Cell Air Cathode?

[Black Gold Alchemist]

It seems like this would be good as a battery/fuel cell air cathode. You could put this stuff, then a layer of activated charcoal, then a current collector. This would cause the water-air interface to be somewhere inside the activated charcoal, so you would end up with a huge surface area of the air/water interface. This would improve alkaline fuel cells of all types (aluminium, iron, zinc and hydrogen).

Re:Inside tire treads?

[mcgrew]

The hydrophobic material would be deposited inside the grooves, not where the rubber met the road.