DailyDirt: Like Water Off A Duck's Back…
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Surfaces that repel water are pretty fascinating to watch in action, especially on clothes when possible stains are magically avoided. There are plenty of other uses for hydrophobic materials that are cool, and some newer materials are omniphobic — even superomniphobic. Here are just a few examples of these products that may be protecting all of our gadgets someday.
- A superhydrophobic coating called NeverWet can make a variety of materials extremely water resistent — preventing things like ice buildup, corrosion and biofilm formation. As a demo, coating an iPhone with this stuff allowed it to be submerged for 30 minutes and still work… [url]
- Bio-inspired materials can be omniphobic — repelling both oil and water. Plants do it. Maybe educated
fleashumans can, too. [url] - Ceramic materials that repel water could form more durable hydrophobic coatings. Rare earth oxides aren’t so rare, and they could potentially create some pretty cool superhydrophobic surfaces. [url]
- A recently-created superomniphobic surface coating repels almost any liquid except chlorofluorocarbons. Non-Newtonian liquids also seem to “bounce” off this stuff — which hasn’t been seen before. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.
Filed Under: coatings, hydrophobic, materials, neverwet, omniphobic
Comments on “DailyDirt: Like Water Off A Duck's Back…”
Whoa.
The bottommost item leads to this scary malware-site alert:
Oddly, it looks like it’s supposed to go to phys.org, a site that’s generally regarded as reputable (except by the rather overly-conservative Peerguardian, which seems to think it’s hostile to P2P but which is also known for producing frequent false positives).
Re: Whoa.
Dont know why a link shorten-er was used but I clicked through for the hell of it.
http://phys.org/news/2013-01-material-liquids-wont.html
Re: Re: Whoa.
This. It’s not 1997 anymore.
Re: Whoa.
The link makes by browser choke for over 15 minutes before I killed it.
Possibly caused by some Ads or what. Beware.
Educated bees?
Fleas? I think someone has misheard those lyrics.
Re: Educated bees?
Birds do it
Bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let’s do it
Let’s fall in love
Re: Re: Educated bees?
TANK GIRL!
hmmmn...
Am I the only one who thinks it’s cool than something omniPHOBIC of water an oil is being used to obviate the need to use something omniPHILLIC of water and oil (soap)?
Metamaterial engineering is AWESOME.
I think that iPhone is still probably toast. Sure, you coat it with that substance and it repels water, but in order for it to keep working, you’d also have to gunk up the charging port, the phone jack, etc. with the water-repellant, which would in itself render the phone rather useless.