Video: New Super-Waterproof Material Makes Water Drops Bounce Off
Is that a rubber ball making its way down a two-by-four? No, it's actually a drop of water hitting a strip of experimental material that's so water-resistant, it makes drops bounce. The video above comes from the work of a team of materials scientists from the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The team created a new, super-waterproof material by engineering a surface with particular nano-scale structures. Scientists are continually looking to make waterproof materials that can coat boat hulls, car parts and medical devices. Such coatings, which are technically called super-hydrophobic coatings, help keep vehicles and devices clear of ice, algae and other unwanted stuff. In this case, a team of three scientists made and tested two different 20-nanometer-wide surface structures: cylindrical columns and thin, pointy cones. They found water could still cling to the flat tops of the columns, but the cones forced water to ball up and roll away,...