Alan
McStravick for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Can
technology benefit by going green? I’m not talking about retro-fitting
buildings for solar power or setting up grey water collection systems. In the
recent issue of the journal Soft
Matter, a research team out of the Ohio State University is looking at organic materials
to aid in the resurfacing of existing technologies and possibly for the
manufacture of new products and materials.
The
team, comprised primarily of engineers, is taking a detailed look at the
structure of butterfly wings and rice leaves. What
they found with regard to their microscopic texture could improve a
variety of products.
The
researchers contend that these items, and their structure specifically, enhance
fluid flow and work to prevent surfaces from collecting dirt and dust. Their
study, should the structure be able to be mimicked in high-tech surfaces, could
be a substantial benefit to the manufacturers of air and watercraft, pipelines
and medical equipment.
“Nature
has evolved many surfaces that are self-cleaning or reduce drag,” said Bharat
Bhushan, Ohio Eminent Scholar and Howard D. Winbigler Professor of mechanical engineering at
Ohio State. “Reduced drag is desirable for industry, whether you’re trying to
move a few drops of blood through a nano-channel or millions of gallons of
crude oil through a pipeline. And self-cleaning surfaces would be useful for
medical equipment – catheters, or anything that might harbor bacteria.”
Bhushan,
along with doctoral student Gregory Bixler, studied the wings of the Giant Blue Morpho butterfly (Morpho didius) and leaves
of the rice plant Oriza sativa. After viewing these two items under an
electron microscope and an optical profiler, they cast plastic replicas of both
of the microscopic textures. Once completed, they compared their ability to
repel dirt and water to replicas of fish scales, shark skin and plain flat
surfaces.
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