Official Product of The Slippery Slope

Tak-Sing Wong from Harvard University has created a synthetic material so slippery that it makes a duck’s back look like a sponge. It is “omniphobic” – it repels everything. All manner of liquids, from water to blood to crude oil, roll straight off it. Ice cannot form on it. It even heals itself when damaged. It’s an extraordinary material and it was inspired by the lips of a flesh-eating plant. . . .

Wong has mimicked these structures to create SLIPS – slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces – that are more slippery than either their natural counterparts, or other man-made materials. They are made of either stacks of tiny posts, each a thousand times thinner than a human hair, or a random network of similarly thin fibres. These provide a rough structure, which Wong filled with a lubricant, just as the pitcher plant saturates its rough cells with nectar. The lubricant mixes with neither water nor oils, and it barely evaporates.

The SLIPS are like sponges – solid blocks that trap liquids – but they are designed to firmly hold the liquid in place, while keeping its surface smooth and flat. This combination allows them to to repel a far greater range of liquids than any other man-made surface. . . .

There are many possible applications. A wall coated in SLIPS would be impossible to graffiti. Medical devices or instruments covered in SLIPS would be hard to contaminate. The SLIPS are stable under a range of temperatures and pressures, which makes them useful for transporting fluids from crude oil to biofuels, or for exploring the deep ocean. They’re ice-resistant, and could be used to coat instruments in polar conditions. They are transparent and self-cleaning, so you could used them to make lenses, sensors, solar cells or night-vision devices. . . .


http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/09/21/flesh-eating-plant-inspires-super-slippery-material-that-repels-everything/