Bioinspired multiscale interfacial materials with superwettability

Abstract

Nature always supplies inspirations to scientists and engineers. Many newfangled materials have been fabricated by learning from and mimicking nature. In daily life and industrial processes these bioinspired novel materials have been widely used. The special wettability of natural organisms is significant to their life and attractive to researchers, which inspires us to fabricate the functional interfacial materials with high performances. In the last decade, the bioinspired multiscale interfacial materials exhibiting superwettability have emerged as a new type of functional material. Superwettable materials offer great chances to solve numerous issues ranging from fundamental research to practical exploration, and from bionic philosophy to fabricating technology. Inspired by nature's example, researchers developed a series of scientific strategies of new materials and fabricating methods, technologies, and applications. Based on the requirement of developing advanced materials in the fields of energy, environment, healthcare and resource, superwettable materials possessing binary cooperative nanostructure have been widely investigated to solve scientific and technical problems. In this review, we firstly present the development history of bioinspired multiscale interfacial materials with superwettability and the theoretical basis of the wettability of solid surfaces. Secondly, the principles of superwettable functional surfaces in nature is revealed and the bionic designs of bioinspired materials are discussed in detail. Meanwhile the typical applications of superwettable materials such as self-cleaning, oil-water separation and green printing are introduced. Finally, the perspectives of the future development of bioinspired superwettable materials are proposed for further studying the superwettable materials.