The issue of self‐cleaning significantly gained popularity due to the work of Barthlott and coworkers on the so called “Lotos‐Effect®”. They found out, that the cleanliness of the Lotos leaves originates from a combined effect of surface topography and hydrophobicity. The symbol of the beautiful Lotos flower as well as the fascination of surfaces being cleaned without any manual activity, simply by a rain shower, has since then stimulated the fantasy of many researchers. Our vision is to copy this mechanism from mother nature and to implement it into coating systems in such a way, that conventional application techniques, e.g. spray‐coating, can be applied without the necessity of further process steps like e.g. soft lithography. Three different approaches will be presented in this paper. Roughness and contact angle measurements have been used to quantify the self‐cleaning properties.

Diffusing wave spectroscopy (DWS) in the backscattering geometry was employed to observe the evolution of the intensity correlation function during the acidification of skimmed milk by gluconic-δ-lactone (GDL). At the stage when the formation of casein particle gel is largely complete the correlation function at shorter decay times reveals the local structural arrest of the casein micelles, whereas at longer delay times it illustrates the hindered slow motion of casein micelle aggregates. We use the principles of the approach suggested by Mason, Gang and Weitz, linking the optically measured mean square displacement, <Δr2(t)>, of the microscopic particles in a dense colloid to its viscoelastic properties, to provide an estimate of the frequency dependent viscoelastic modulus of the acidified milk gel (AMG). We compare the viscoelastic moduli measured by the conventional mechanical rheometry with the optically measured ones. The results of the two different experimental methods are found to be in reasonable agreement.

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