Water manipulation is crucial for a wide range of engineering applications, such as microfluidics, heat transfer, desalination, and water harvesting. Despite scientific achievements in the past few decades, it remains challenging to achieve efficient and well‐controllable droplet transport in practical applications. In nature, creatures have evolved ingenious wisdom to manipulate water to adapt to their environments. Learning from nature and combining bioinspirations with advanced manufacturing technology are promising to fabricate excellent materials for directional water transport. In this review, we summarize the mechanisms of water droplet manipulation on various biological surfaces and review the recent progress in fabricating hydrophilic surfaces, hybrid hydrophilic/hydrophobic surfaces, and slippery lubricant‐infused porous surfaces (SLIPSs) with bioinspiration for water manipulation. These novel bioinspired materials have great potential in many fields, especially for water harvesting. Finally, current challenges and future perspectives in this field are proposed.
Moisture-responsive actuators are widely used as energy-harvesting devices due to their excellent ability to spontaneously and continuously convert external energy into kinetic energy. However, it remains a challenge to sustainably synthesize moisture-driven actuators. Here, we present a sustainable zero-waste emission methodology to prepare soft actuators using carbon nano-powders and biodegradable polymers through a water evaporation method. Due to the water solubility and recyclability of the matrixes employed here, the entire synthetic process achieves zero-waste emission. Our composite films featured strong figures of merit and capabilities with a 250 • maximum bending angle under 90% relative humidity. Programmable motions and intelligent bionic applications, including walkers, smart switches, robotic arms, flexible excavators, and hand-shaped actuators, were further achieved by modulating the geometry of the actuators. This sustainable method for actuators' fabrication has great potential in large-scale productions and applications due to its advantages of zero-waste emission manufacturing, excellent recyclability, inherent adaptive integration, and low cost.
Front Cover: The cover image is based on the Review Article Bioinspired superwetting materials for water manipulation by Leng et al. This cover image demonstrates functional surfaces in nature such as lotus leaves and butterfly wings. Inspired by these surfaces, scientists have designed a myriad of functional materials with super‐wetting performance. The paper that is highlighted by this cover image provides a comprehensive review of bioinspired super‐wetting materials that are designed for applications of water manipulation.
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