New coating creates ‘superglass’
A new transparent, bioinspired coating makes ordinary glass tough, self-cleaning, and incredibly slippery, a team from Harvard University reported online July 31 in Nature Communications. The new coating could be used to create durable, scratch-resistant lenses for eyeglasses, self-cleaning windows, improved solar panels, and new medical diagnostic devices, said principal investigator Joanna Aizenberg, the Amy Smith Berylson Professor of Materials Science in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and professor of chemistry and chemical biology. The new coating builds on an award-winning technology pioneered by Aizenberg and her team called Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces (SLIPS) — the slipperiest synthetic surface known. The new coating is equally slippery, but much more durable and fully transparent. Together these advances solve longstanding challenges in creating commercially useful materials that repel almost everything. The tiny, tightly packed cells of the honeycomb structure,...