Thursday, December 1, 2011

Soot coating creates self-cleaning surface

Soot coating creates self-cleaning surface: A candle flame will coat a glass slide with black soot. The soot looks uniform, but a scanning electron microscope reveals a fractal-like network of carbon particles that makes it superhydrophobic, or incredibly water-repellent...
Now, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz, Germany, and the Technical University Darmstadt, also in Germany, have realised that coating the soot particles in a thin layer of silica replicates their water-repelling structure. They then heat the surface to 600 °C for 2 hours to destroy the soot particles, leaving behind the see-through silica.

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