I would like to have seen it dipped. Also demonstrated with contaminated water of some kind, maybe flour & water paste.
He states it would not degrade, but surely expansion and contraction will take a toll on nanoscale etchings, as well as abrasion and acid content of airborne contaminants.
The surface, upon visual inspection in the video looks rough. What happens say if the surface is regularly in contact with skin during a practical application? Does the skin get abraded into the microstructure of the material surface and degrade its hydrophobic properties?
Looks amazing though watching the water spread out and spring back that much. Simply incredible.
And Chunlei does it again. I was an undergraduate when he arrived and helped set up the first UHV chamber for his initial tests. Let me just say that not only is he brilliant but he is also about as down to earth a person as you could ever meet. He seriously has no ego, is easy going and has an internal drive that's unbelievable.
If he ever wants to start a company, whomever he reaches out to, fund him.
I would love to learn more about the structure of the patterns etched into the metals. I took a quick look through the links from the article, but didn't find anything with meat. Does anyone have a link?
I'd love to see it under a microscope, or see a visualization of the pattern. Is the strategy to maximize the surface area of an existing hydrophobic material?
Some of the features have sizes comparable to the wavelength of visible light. I would be very, very surprised if you could see clearly through a surface patterned like this.
"As the water bounces off the super-hydrophobic surfaces, it also collects dust particles and takes them along for the ride... Better yet, it remains completely dry."
That requires a sufficient water-to-dust ratio.
Driving jeeps in the Congo, or having dust blown up from dunes in a sudden gust, will require wipers. Not to mention pollen.
Hmm, that's not a bad idea! Current sprayers would obviously be inefficient because they rely on wipers to spread fluid widely over the windshield, but I'm sure that could be changed. (Such as a top pressure-rail for dispensation)
Do hydrophobic materials interact differently with gases as well? What would the air flow be like over a wing made out of a superhydrophobic material like this? Would it facilitate or disrupt airflow, or not matter?
Teflon became a thing because it's both hydrophobic and lipophobic. There are lots of hydrophobic surfaces that work very well until you get dirt, finger oils, soap, or just about anything that isn't water-soluble on them. There may also be an issue here with friction damage.
Hopefully the technique here can be adapted to practical products.
The technique is extremely flexible. I'm sure they'll figure out an etching pattern that is both extremely lipophobic and hydrophobic. Only hydrophobia has many applications already.
I wanted to know more about the practical applications of the syperhydrophilic metals (the counter-technology of the one discussed here), and found this video [1] with Chunlei informative.
My thoughts exactly... maybe because I'm reading Sail Performance at the moment! Weight, durability and shapability would be important properties vs. the nominal reduction in drag, though.
But for now, baby the shit out of them. Buy one that gets legit amazon reviews for your next one. Hand wash it and mayyybe use a sponge when washing it. Only use wooden, plastic or silicone utensils in it.
If somebody cleans it with a scrubby pad or uses a metal spatula, they get shot/buy you your next pan. :)
I did 2 years on my most recent nonstick pan until my roommate cleaned it with a scrubby pad.
Seriously yes - after I figured out how to use and care for cast iron I wondered what the heck made me buy nonstick pans in the first place. The main downsides are the weight of cast iron, or if some clueless person in your house throws it in the sink for a few days.
Personal experience. A few years ago my prostate enlarged relatively suddenly, to the point of making urination difficult. My doctor had no idea why, but it eventually dawned on me that I had recently been eating a lot of scrambled eggs, scrambled in a Teflon-coated skillet. I replaced it with a ceramic nonstick skillet, and the problem went away.
If you want absolute proof an anecdote won't satisfy you, but it's plenty of evidence for me. Look at the cost/risk calculation. The cost of a ceramic pan is on the order of $35; the cost of getting cancer is potentially quite large. There doesn't have to be a very large probability that Teflon causes cancer before it's not worth taking the chance.
Look. It takes science a long time to settle all these questions with rigorous research. In the meantime we all have to make decisions in our lives with imperfect, incomplete information. Dismissing all reports of potential risks until there is incontrovertible proof of danger is foolish; doing so out of some misguided fealty to Science and Progress is arrogant.
Downvote all you want, but you're not going to get me to stop posting anecdotes when I think they're relevant. Yes, their probative value is limited; I even acknowledged this in the post! But it isn't zero, and in a world of limited and often conflicting information, sometimes it's the best we can get.
6 months? I think you're doing something wrong here. Keep teflon coated material to low temperatures, use plastic/wood/silicone utensils and avoid abrasive cleaning techniques.
"While PTFE is stable and nontoxic at lower temperatures, it begins to deteriorate after the temperature of cookware reaches about 260 °C (500 °F), and decomposes above 350 °C (662 °F).
…
Meat is usually fried between 204 and 232 °C (399 and 450 °F), and most oils start to smoke before a temperature of 260 °C (500 °F) is reached, but there are at least two cooking oils (refined safflower oil and avocado oil) that have a higher smoke point than 260 °C (500 °F). Empty cookware can also exceed this temperature when heated."
Did you have some implicit expectation that you could heat it for an arbitrary amount of time, at full power, and it would just be fine? Almost all of the spot checking I just did shows temperature warnings / upper limits of around 450 degrees F for non-stick pans, right on their packaging.
Also, equivalently-sized cast iron pans are almost always cheaper than their quality non-stick (i.e. Calphalon) counterparts, and you can restore them if you jack up the seasoning on them.
The comment you reply to doesn't complain about their use of teflon (a complaint you imply in your first paragraph) and they praise the cheapness of cast iron (which you repeat with an 'also' in your second paragraph, the 'also' makes it look like you are trying to correct their understanding of the relative situation).
When I went to college and moved in a dorm I got a really good teflon coated pan from my parents. It's still works fine and it's 6 years old now. I even lent it to other guys in the dorm and I wasn't extremely cautious with it. I dealt with shitty pans too though. I think the quality of Teflon coatings could be extremely varying .
I'd expect pans made with this new technique to be as delicate as Teflon, if not more so. Those laser-etched ridges are quite tiny, and if you scratched the pan with a piece of metal, you'd probably wear away the ridges very quickly, creating localized areas of non-hydrophobia.
Note that if you try to avoid the formation of rust by submerging your steel in water, thinking that will remove the oxidative air component, you run into corrosion issues unless you are submerging in a tank of constantly refreshed distilled water.
Awesome. Looking forward for a finally lipophobic smartphone. In fact, in the future all surfaces of consumer electronics and other stuff should be superhydrophobic.
I think there are far better ways to do this on a small object of limited lifespan like a smartphone, not to mention that metal is not an ideal way to make a smartphone. You can use it some surfaces, but at some point you'll need plastic and glass.
I would like to have seen it dipped. Also demonstrated with contaminated water of some kind, maybe flour & water paste.
He states it would not degrade, but surely expansion and contraction will take a toll on nanoscale etchings, as well as abrasion and acid content of airborne contaminants.