Superhydrophobicity With Self-Adaptive Water Pressure Resistance and Adhesion of Pistia Stratiotes Leaf

Abstract

Superhydrophobic surfaces are promising for optimizing amphibious aircraft by minimizing water drag and adhesion. Achieving this involves ensuring these surfaces can resist high liquid pressure caused by deep water and fluid flow. Maximizing the solid-liquid contact area is a common strategy to improve liquid pressure resistance. However, this approach inevitably increases solid-liquid adhesion, making it challenging to guarantee a trade-off between the two wetting characteristics. Here, it is found that the Pistia stratiotes leaf exhibits superhydrophobicity with high water pressure resistance and low adhesion, attributed to its self-adaptive deformable microstructure with unique re-entrant features. Under pressure, these microstructures deform to increase the solid-liquid contact area, thereby enhancing water pressure resistance. The re-entrant features elevate the deformation threshold, enabling higher modulus microstructures to achieve adaptive response. This facilitates the recovery of deformed microstructures, restoring the air layer and maintaining low adhesion. Following these concepts, Pistia stratiotes leaf-inspired surfaces are fabricated, achieving an 183% improvement in water impact resistance and an ≈80% reduction in adhesion after overpressure compared to conventional superhydrophobic surfaces. The design principles inspired by Pistia stratiotes promise significant advancements in amphibious aircraft and other trans-media vehicles.