1 research outputs found
Two-Photon Polymerization of Butterfly Wing Scale Inspired Surfaces with Anisotropic Wettability
Wings
of Morph aega butterflies are natural surfaces that exhibit
anisotropic liquid wettability. The direction-dependent arrangement
of the wing scales creates orientation-turnable microstructures with
two distinct contact modes for liquid droplets. Enabled by recent
developments in additive manufacturing, such natural surface designs
coupled with hydrophobicity play a crucial role in applications such
as self-cleaning, anti-icing, and fluidic manipulation. However, the
interplay among resolution, architecture, and performance of bioinspired
structures is barely achieved. Herein, inspired by the wing scales
of the Morpho aega butterfly, full-scale synthetic surfaces with anisotropic
wettability fabricated by two-photon polymerization are reported.
The quality of the artificial butterfly scale is improved by optimizing
the laser scanning strategy and the objective lens movement path.
The corresponding contact angles of water on the fabricated architecture
with various design parameters are measured, and the anisotropic fluidic
wettability is investigated. Results demonstrate that tuning the geometrical
parameters and spatial arrangement of the artificial wing scales enables
anisotropic behaviors of the droplet’s motion. The measured
results also indicate a reverse phenomenon of the fabricated surfaces
in contrast to their natural counterparts, possibly attributed to
the significant difference in equilibrium wettability between the
fabricated microstructures and the natural Morpho aega surface. These
findings are utilized to design next-generation fluid-controllable
interfaces for manipulating liquid mobility on synthetic surfaces