Controlling ice formation on gradient wettability surfaces for high-performance bioinspired materials
Thursday, August 6, 2020 - 11:30
in Physics & Chemistry
Ice-templating is a powerful technique to construct biological materials using ice nucleation and growth to obtain frozen material architectures, but scientists have been unable to control these two factors with effective methods. In a new report on Science Advances, Nifang Zhao and a team of scientists in chemical and biological engineering at Zhejiang University in China, demonstrated successive ice nucleation and preferential growth by introducing a wettability gradient on a cold finger (a laboratory device used to generate a localized cold surface). The work highlighted the ability to harness the rich designability of surface wettability patterns to engineer high-performance bulk materials with bioinspired complex architectures.