DailyDirt: Like Water Off A Duck's Back...

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Tue, Jan 29th 2013 5:00pm — Michael Ho

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 ~~fleas~~ humans 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.

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Filed Under: coatings, hydrophobic, materials, neverwet, omniphobic

9 Comments

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Androgynous Cowherd, 29 Jan 2013 @ 7:21pm

Whoa.
The bottommost item leads to this scary malware-site alert:

The link you requested has been identified by bitly as being potentially problematic. This could be because a bitly user has reported a problem ...

The link you requested may contain inappropriate content, or even spam or malicious code that could be downloaded to your computer without your consent, or may be a forgery or imitation of another website, designed to trick users into sharing personal or financial information.

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).
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- weneedhelp - not signed in, 29 Jan 2013 @ 7:52pm
  
  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
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  - dennis deems (profile), 30 Jan 2013 @ 7:00am
    
    Re: Re: Whoa.
    Dont know why a link shorten-er was used
    This. It's not 1997 anymore.
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- Anonymous Coward, 29 Jan 2013 @ 7:58pm
  
  Re: Whoa.
  The link makes by browser choke for over 15 minutes before I killed it.
  
  Possibly caused by some Ads or what. Beware.
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Anonymous Coward, 29 Jan 2013 @ 7:26pm

Educated bees?
Fleas? I think someone has misheard those lyrics.
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- dennis deems (profile), 30 Jan 2013 @ 6:51am
  
  Re: Educated bees?
  Birds do it
  Bees do it
  Even educated fleas do it
  Let's do it
  Let's fall in love
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  - Anonymous Coward, 30 Jan 2013 @ 4:10pm
    
    Re: Re: Educated bees?
    TANK GIRL!
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Isaac Kotlicky (profile), 30 Jan 2013 @ 5:48am

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.
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btr1701 (profile), 1 Feb 2013 @ 2:41pm

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.
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