Abstract
Unidirectional liquid transport without any need of external energy has drawn worldwide attention for its potential applications in various fields such as microfluidics, biomedicine and mechanical engineering. In nature, numerous creatures have evolved such extraordinary unidirectional liquid transport ability, such as spider silk, Sarracenia’s trichomes, and Nepenthes alata’s peristome, etc. This review summarizes the current progresses of natural unidirectional liquid transport on 1-Dimensional (1D) linear structure and 2-Dimensional (2D) surface structure. The driving force of unidirectional liquid transport which is determined by unique structure exist distinct differences in physics. The fundamental understanding of 1D and 2D unidirectional liquid transport especially about hierarchical structural characteristics and their transport mechanism were concentrated, and various bioinspired fabrication methods are also introduced. The applications of bioinspired directional liquid transport are demonstrated especially in fields of microfluidics, biomedical devices and anti-icing surfaces. With newly developed smart materials, various liquid transport regulation strategies are also summarized for the control of transport speed, direction guiding, etc. Finally, we provide new insights and future perspectives of the directional transport materials.
Highlights
Unidirectional liquid transport has gradually attracted worldwide attention due to its diverse potential applications, such as water collection[1], microfluidics[2,3], lubrication[4–8], anti-adhesion[9–12] and liquid transportation[13,14]
Significant achievements have been made over the past decades in exploring nature samples with 1D and 2D unidirectional liquid transport
Their underlying mechanisms have been revealed under the cooperative effects of 1D/2D featured micro-nano hierarchical structures and tuned material wettability
Summary
Unidirectional liquid transport has gradually attracted worldwide attention due to its diverse potential applications, such as water collection[1], microfluidics[2,3], lubrication[4–8], anti-adhesion[9–12] and liquid transportation[13,14]. With millions of years of evolution, many nature plants have developed such functional structures or surfaces to directional transport water for survival without any need of external energy[15–25]. These natural surfaces or structures possess unique hierarchical micro-nano structures and various material wettability. Significant progress of bioinspired 1D and 2D unidirectional liquid transport structures has been made, such as the bioinspired design of 1D directional transport with spindle knots wire, cone array surface, and hierarchical cones structure[26–28], and 2D directional transport with inclined pillar arrays surface and Nepenthes peristome mimetic surface[29,30]. A perspective has been given for the future exploration of bioinspired unidirectional liquid transport
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