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

[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.

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

[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.

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?

[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.

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.

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".

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).