Wetting articles within Nature Materials

Featured

  • Article |

    Solid-state pressure sensors have performance limitations in liquid environments. Here, the authors design a pressure sensor using solid–liquid–liquid–gas multiphasic interfaces where a trapped air layer modulates capacitance changes with pressure to achieve near-friction-free contact line motions for near-ideal pressure sensing.

    • Wen Cheng
    • , Xinyu Wang
    •  & Benjamin C. K. Tee

  • Letter |

    Rewritable surface charge density gradients enable the direct, high-speed and long-distance transport of droplets on distinct surfaces without the need of additional energy input.

    • Qiangqiang Sun
    • , Dehui Wang
    •  & Xu Deng

  • Article |

    Liquid repellent coatings are important for several applications. Now, a coating that repels ultralow surface tension liquids and simultaneously shows robustness and transparency is reported.

    • Shuaijun Pan
    • , Rui Guo
    •  & Frank Caruso

  • Article |

    Ultrafast water transport in the surface of Sarracenia trichome is reported and demonstrated in synthetic bioinspired materials, where nano- and microchannels induce high-speed sliding of droplets on top of a thin water film.

    • Huawei Chen
    • , Tong Ran
    •  & Lei Jiang

  • News & Views |

    A combination of hard, soft and nanoscale organic components results in robust superhydrophobic surfaces that can withstand mechanical abrasion and chemical oxidation, and exhibit excellent substrate adhesion.

    • Henri-Louis Girard
    • , Sami Khan
    •  & Kripa K. Varanasi

  • News & Views |

    Surfaces with slippery asymmetric bumps significantly increase water droplet condensation and shedding.

    • Manu Prakash

  • Letter |

    Highly bendable yet unstretchable ultrathin sheets can wrap a liquid droplet to form an optimal non-spherical shape that minimizes the unwrapped interfacial area, regardless of interfacial energies and the sheet’s mechanical properties.

    • Joseph D. Paulsen
    • , Vincent Démery
    •  & Narayanan Menon

  • Editorial |

    As with the ongoing debate on the degree of wetting transparency of supported graphene, transparency in both pre- and post-publication peer review is a contentious concept.

  • News & Views |

    Pristine graphitic surfaces seem to be more hydrophilic than previously assumed because of the unexpected influence of the quick adsorption of hydrocarbons from air.

    • Ke Xu
    •  & James R. Heath

  • Commentary |

    For the case of water on supported graphene, about 30% of the van der Waals interactions between the water and the substrate are transmitted through the one-atom-thick layer.

    • Chih-Jen Shih
    • , Michael S. Strano
    •  & Daniel Blankschtein

  • Article |

    Contact-angle and spectroscopy experiments on clean supported graphene and graphite show that these surfaces become more hydrophobic as they adsorb airborne hydrocarbons. Furthermore, the water contact angle on these graphitic surfaces decreases if these contaminants are partially removed by both thermal annealing and controlled ultraviolet–ozone treatments, suggesting that graphitic surfaces are more hydrophilic than previously believed.

    • Zhiting Li
    • , Yongjin Wang
    •  & Haitao Liu

  • News & Views |

    Ceramic surfaces can be rendered hydrophobic by using polymeric modifiers, but these are not robust to harsh environments. A known family of rare-earth oxide ceramics is now found to exhibit intrinsic hydrophobicity, even after exposure to high temperatures and abrasive wear.

    • Ye Tian
    •  & Lei Jiang

  • Commentary |

    Research on superhydrophobic materials has mostly focused on their extreme non-wettability. However, the implications of superhydrophobicity beyond wetting, in particular for transport phenomena, remain largely unexplored.

    • Lydéric Bocquet
    •  & Eric Lauga

  • Letter |

    The controlled formation of micrometre-size drops is of importance for many technological applications such as microfluidics. A wetting-based destabilization mechanism of forced microfilaments on either hydrophilic or hydrophobic stripes leading to the periodic emission of droplets can now be used to control independently the drop size and emission period.

    • R. Ledesma-Aguilar
    • , R. Nistal
    •  & I. Pagonabarraga

  • Article |

    Hydrophobic surfaces composed of an asymmetric array of polymer nanorods show unidirectional wetting behaviour relative to the orientation of the tilted nanorods. The surfaces, which are smooth on the microscale, can transport water droplets of microlitre capacity by a ratcheting mechanism resulting from the pillared substrate.

    • Niranjan A. Malvadkar
    • , Matthew J. Hancock
    •  & Melik C. Demirel

  • Letter |

    Approaches for controlling surface wettability and liquid spreading are numerous and diverse, but introducing directionality to the control of these phenomena is far from trivial. Nanostructured surfaces are now used to allow the propagation of a liquid in a single direction, while constraining it in the other three directions.

    • Kuang-Han Chu
    • , Rong Xiao
    •  & Evelyn N. Wang

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