Spontaneous, directional liquid transport on natural and artificial surfaces

Billions of years of evolution has endowed the biological world with exquisite functionalities. Learning from nature satisfies our innate curiosity for understanding the world, but also opens up new routes to develop disruptive technology to address grant challenges facing us. Over the past decade, the fusion of nature-inspired engineering with other cutting edge technologies has enabled us to develop various new materials with a high level of functionalities. Despite exciting progress, it still remains challenging to fully recapitulate the structural and functional sophistication inherent in nature.
In this talk, I will outline recent progress of our research on the fundamental understanding of interfacial and transport phenomenon on natural/synthetic surfaces and translating this learning to develop novel natured-inspired surfaces which allow for the directional mass, momentum and energy transport in harsh environments for a wide range of applications such as thermal management, anti-icing, antibacterial, switchable adhesion and microfluidics.