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Liquid repellent surface
Liquid repellent surface
Ever wondered how to stop things from sticking to surfaces—like fingerprints on your phone, snow on a car, or even food left behind in a container? That’s the big question driving our research! We're exploring how to prevent unwanted adhesion in all kinds of materials: from fluidic foods and polymer melts to biomaterials, granular substances, mist, and even ice.
To crack this puzzle, we’re diving deep into the physics of adhesion using high-speed cameras and custom-designed optical setups. One of our proudest achievements? We created a super liquid-repellent coating—a surface so advanced it combines nano- to micro-scale structures with hydrophobic chemistry. The result: water droplets form perfect beads with contact angles around 170°, and they roll off with just a slight tilt—no sticking at all!
This technology could revolutionize industries—imagine non-fouling clothes that almost never need washing! We're also exploring cutting-edge ideas like liquid marbles and liquid-infused surfaces.
See Advanced Materials Interfaces (2022), Langmuir (2017) & Advanced Functional Materials (2016)
Superomniphobic surface
Liquid-repellent coatings can help reduce food loss caused by adhesion to containers.
Super-liquid-repellent glass bottle
Anti-fogging slippery surface (SPLASH)
Multi-functional liquid slippery surface
Drycells: Micropowdering single-cells
Drycells: Micropowdering single-cells
We created “drycells” — tiny droplets of cell suspension wrapped in hydrophobic nanoparticles that look and behave like dry powder, yet still contain over 95% liquid culture medium inside. By fine-tuning the formation process, we can control how many cells are encapsulated, how diverse the cell types are, and how individual cells form colonies. This innovative platform opens the door to precise cell picking and high-resolution single-cell analysis — a powerful new tool for advancing biomedical research and biotechnology.
Adaptive droplet
Adaptive droplet
Imagine a material that can switch from a soft, flowing liquid to a firm, solid-like state—instantly, and without any temperature change. That’s the magic of jamming, a cutting-edge concept we're exploring to create smart, adaptive materials.
Unlike traditional phase transitions, jamming happens when particles get tightly packed together—like traffic turning into a jam—not because of heat or cold, but due to how densely they’re arranged. In our research, we use hydrophobic particles trapped at the liquid–air interface to control this packing, creating what's known as interfacial jamming.
What we discovered is exciting: by adjusting how these particles pack together, we can tune the shape and flow behavior of liquid droplets. These droplets can instantly shift from a wettable, liquid-like state to a soft solid with elastic or plastic properties. This means we can design materials that adapt their mechanical properties on demand—perfect for applications in soft robotics, flexible electronics, and responsive surfaces.
We’ve uncovered the physics behind this transformation and are now exploring its potential in real-world smart materials.
See Nanoscale (2023), Advanced Materials Interfaces (2020), Advanced Functional Materials (2019)
Reversible jamming transition of adaptive droplet
Non-sticking droplet
Plastically deformed droplet
Wettable droplet
Preprogrammed death of floating droplet
Preprogrammed death of floating droplet
Droplets covered with hydrophobic nanoclay collapse on the liquid pool with a specific lifetime. The lifetime of the droplet can be modulated over seconds to hours scale depending on the selection of chemically modulated wettability of the nanoclay. The critical mechanism of lifetime modulation is responsible for controlling the coalescence kinetics between the water pool and inner liquid by nanoclays’ high diffusion length and chemically varied water spreading potential.
Patchwork on droplets
Patchwork on droplets
Materials with a core-shell structure have been widely explored for applications in carrier systems. Liquid marble is one of the core-shell materials, which is formed by covering a fluid droplet with particles and is expected to be useful for various applications, especially in industrial and biomedical fields. We study the formation of multi-functional liquid marbles for practical applications. A wide variety of functional particles have been synthesized to form functional liquid marbles. However, the formation of multifunctional liquid marbles by integrating several types of functional particles is challenging. We recently reported a general strategy for the flexible patterning of functional particles on droplet surfaces. Based on this strategy, a single bi-functional liquid marble is designed from two mono-functional liquid marbles as an advanced droplet carrier. One of the serious issues in practical use for liquid marble is fragileness. We recently unraveled the dynamics of liquid marble breakage, which is classified into two scenarios. Based on these investigations, we proposed a way to improve the robustness of liquid marbles.
Multi-faced liquid marbles
Adaptive granular raft
Hydrophobic-particles-jammed film on the liquid pool is designed. The film can transport small objects adaptively irrespective of their state (gas/liquid/solid) by switching its state without hindrance from physical obstacles. The film also exhibits adaptive jamming transition for regeneration ability, obstacle penetration, and dispersed solids collection. This work contributes to the development of swarm biomimetics, object transportation, and adaptive materials.
Mechanics of droplet transportation
The transport of liquid droplets plays an essential role in various applications. Modulating the wettability of the material surface is crucial in transporting droplets without external energy, adhesion loss, or intense controllability requirements. Although several studies have investigated droplet manipulation, its design principles have not been categorized considering the mechanical perspective. Here, we categorized liquid droplet transport strategies based on wettability modulation into those involving (i) application of driving force to a droplet on non-sticking surfaces, (ii) formation of gradient surface chemistry/structure, and (iii) formation of anisotropic surface chemistry/structure. Accordingly, reported biological and artificial examples, cutting-edge applications, and future perspectives are summarized.
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