Bioinspired Cilia Array Surfaces for Programmable Unidirectional Liquid Transport across Surface Tension Regimes.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 42378121.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1021/acs.nanolett.6c01922.
- No licence information is recorded for this record.
- Because redistribution is not established, this page shows the abstract only. Follow the links below for the full text.
Abstract
Unidirectional liquid transport is critical for diverse applications, e.g., atmospheric water harvesting, integrated microfluidics, and high-efficiency heat transfer. However, existing strategies are mostly limited to narrow surface-tension ranges. Here, we designed bioinspired asymmetric cilia arrays (BACAs) mimicking the 45° inclined cilia of <i>Alchemilla mollis</i>, achieving unidirectional liquid transport over an ultrabroad surface-tension range of 22.2-72.8 mN m<sup>-1</sup>. Systematic studies show that transport modes depend on surface tension, solid surface energy, and cilia spacing. For 0.6 mm-spaced BACAs (∼16.4 mJ m<sup>-2</sup>), ethanol/water mixtures exhibit reverse transport above 32.1 mN m<sup>-1</sup>, forward transport below 28.0 mN m<sup>-1</sup>, and bidirectional flow in between. These phenomena arise from the dynamic equilibrium between gravity and capillarity. We further established a theoretical predictive framework based on the bidirectional transport contact angle to quantify transport modes, which contributed to achieve programmable liquid routing and precise spatiotemporal control over liquid transport.