Lotus leaves are superhydrophobic due to their microstructure, and Shuxi Dai and colleagues have pioneered a method of replicating this in a ZnO film by a ‘bottom up’ method. Using real lotus leaves as templates, they replicated the microstructure on ZnO films. The material consists of an array of micropillars, on which further nanostructures form after a second hydrothermal treatment. Depending on the solution used in the second stage, properties of the final structure, such as hydrophobicity, can be tuned.
Many natural materials have microstructures that give them desirable chemical or mechanical properties, and the method presented in this paper enables scientists to mimic them easily on other materials such as functional metal oxides.
Find out more from their article.
Biomimetic fabrication and tunable wetting properties of three-dimensional hierarchical ZnO structures by combining soft lithography templated with lotus leaf and hydrothermal treatments
Shuxi Dai, Dianbo Zhang, Qing Shi, Xiao Han, Shujie Wang and Zuliang Du
CrystEngComm, 2013, Advance Article
DOI: 10.1039/C3CE40238J
