Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a material that can force drops of water to defy gravity and climb up walls.
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have come up with a material that can force drops of water to defy gravity and climb up walls.
The elastic material is covered in microscopic, movable structures about a quarter the diameter of a human hair that change direction in response to an external magnetic field.
Researchers designed the material based in part on cilia, which are small hairs that line human nasal passages.
The direction of the metal bristles on the surface of the material form a pathway for drops of water to move up against the force of gravity, or in any direction across the surface of the material following the movement of the magnetic field.
Yangying Zhu, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering is quoted as saying: “You could coat this on your car windshield to manipulate rain or sunlight. So you could filter how much solar radiation you want coming in, and also shed raindrops.”
It works to direct water and light so the researchers experimented with shining a laser through the material to see how the movement of the bristles affected the light that came through.
The bristles were able to filter the amount of light based on the angle of the magnetic field.
