Inspired by the Salvinia effect, we report the fabrication and characterization of a novel "sticky" superhydrophobic surface sustaining a Cassie-Baxter wetting state for water droplets with high contact angles but strong solid-liquid retention. Unlike superhydrophobic surfaces mimicking the lotus or petal effect, whose hydrophobicity and droplet retention are typically regulated by hierarchical micro- and nanostructures made of a homogeneous material with the same surface energy, our superhydrophobic surface merely requires singular microstructures covered with a hydrophobic coating but creatively coupled with hydrophilic tips with different surface energy. Hydrophilic tips are selectively formed by meniscus-confined electrodeposition of a metal (e.g., nickel) layer on top of hydrophobic microstructures. During the electrodeposition process, the superhydrophobic surface retains its plastron so that the electrolyte cannot penetrate into the cavity of hydrophobic microstructures, consequently making the electrochemical reaction between solid and electrolyte occur only on the tip. In contrast to typical superhydrophobic surfaces where droplets are highly mobile, the "sticky" superhydrophobic surface allows a water droplet to have strong local pinning and solid-liquid retention on the hydrophilic tips, which is of great significance in many droplet behaviors such as evaporation.

This paper proposed a cubic spline interpolation-based path planning method to maintain the smoothness of moving the robot’s path. Several path nodes were selected as control points for cubic spline interpolation. A full path was formed by interpolating on the path of the starting point, control points, and target point. In this paper, a novel chaotic adaptive particle swarm optimization (CAPSO) algorithm has been proposed to optimize the control points in cubic spline interpolation. In order to improve the global search ability of the algorithm, the position updating equation of the particle swarm optimization (PSO) is modified by the beetle foraging strategy. Then, the trigonometric function is adopted for the adaptive adjustment of the control parameters for CAPSO to weigh global and local search capabilities. At the beginning of the algorithm, particles can explore better regions in the global scope with a larger speed step to improve the searchability of the algorithm. At the later stage of the search, particles do fine search around the extremum points to accelerate the convergence speed of the algorithm. The chaotic map is also used to replace the random parameter of the PSO to improve the diversity of particle swarm and maintain the original random characteristics. Since all chaotic maps are different, the performance of six benchmark functions was tested to choose the most suitable one. The CAPSO algorithm was tested for different number of control points and various obstacles. The simulation results verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm compared with other algorithms. And experiments proved the feasibility of the proposed model in different dynamic environments.

In this paper, we report a simple fabrication process of whole Teflon superhydrophobic surfaces, featuring high-aspect-ratio (>20) nanowire structures, using a hot embossing process. An anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) membrane is used as the embossing mold for the fabrication of high-aspect-ratio nanowires directly on a Teflon substrate. First, high-aspect-ratio nanowire structures of Teflon are formed by pressing a fluorinated ethylene propylene (FEP) sheet onto a heated AAO membrane at 340 • C, which is above the melting point of FEP. Experimental results show that the heating time and aspect ratios of nanopores in the AAO mold are critical to the fidelity of the hot embossed nanowire structures. It has also been found that during the de-molding step, a large adhesive force between the AAO mold and the molded FEP greatly prolongs the length of nanowires. Contact angle measurements indicate that Teflon nanowires make the surface superhydrophobic. The reliability and robustness of superhydrophobicity is verified by a long-term (~6.5 h) underwater turbulent channel flow test. After the first step of hot-embossing the Teflon nanowires, microstructures are further superimposed by repeating the hot embossing process, but this time with microstructured silicon substrates as micromolds and at a temperature lower than the melting temperature of the FEP. The results indicate that the hot embossing process is also an effective way to fabricate hierarchical micro/nanostructures of whole Teflon, which can be useful for applications of Teflon material, such as superhydrophobic surfaces.

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