MIT Creates Hydrophobic Material That Could Revolutionize Fossil Fuel and Nuclear Power Plants

Would this be considered personification? The water droplet seems to be aware of its surroundings and reacting to them.

And, I just can't wait to use, "hrdrophobicity" in a sentence.

hydrohomphobic - fear of gays wearing speedos.

But what will happen when a row of olympic swimmers in superhydrophobic body suits jump into the pool.....

What if the pool forms into a tight droplet? What then, eh?

Well it would depend on how much of their bodies were covered in the stuff. If they went for the full body suit they wouldn't be able to swim, so I'd guess they'd suffocate, after falling through the water to the bottom of the pool, where they'd have a small bubble of "air" around them....

This would make forward motion whilst lying horizontally rather difficult.

Hmmm....or would an equilibrium be reached, and their uncovered hands and feet be able to provide enough motive power to move the bubble throgh the water? Discuss.

And there was me thinking hydrophobia was the major symptom of rabies....

I am thankful to the initiator of the 'superhydrophobic' material blog for enlightening me (and others) of this work at MIT. Because of the article, I have many ideas about the material's possible application. Would it be possible for this blogger to elucidate on the method of improvement directly attributed to cooling tower efficiency improvement? Is the improvement directed only towards cooling towers? The material's effect may be clear to some who made assumptions based on the data conferred but I would appreciate a bit more info from the blogger. Decomposition, temperature limits, a few results of scientifically measured tests and results would help. One additional sentence of empirical data could have made a better read for me. Again, thanks for the info.

I think I see where you're going with this in light of the use of a Boat as an avatar. I'm wondering how this would work on the hull of my boat. I seem to recall that the US Navy has some sort of "whale hide" type covering on their subs that decreases friction and allows for increased speeds and less turbulence. As long as the barnacles don't feast on it, it sounds like a sure winner for that use.

I seem to remember that. In my fuzzy recollection, it was a type of shark skin that has cilia (rods) that flexed as water passed by and negated a normally adhering boundary layer. Either/anyway, my intention was to get the author to name one or two other MIT possible applications. When a small number of possibilities are given, my way of thinking seems to fill in the open spaces between applications, raising the possible number of applications. Also, by adding some test results, my mind is stimulated to invent uses of the data, leading to more applications. I feel as though I have strayed too far from the topic of 'superhydrophobic water'. A most interesting article though and your comment brought back to my mind that 'skin stuff', thanks.

I suspect that the blogger* is working only on information given out by MIT in its press release. Since MIT (and its sponsors) will have spent a small fortune on developing this substance, they are unlikely to release the test data or any information that would allow a competitor to reverse engineer it.

What they are fishing for are major customers (like the Navy, maybe) who are willing to use the technology and fund any future research.

There is also a surface topology (I'm not sure if it is material specific) that is based on the surface of a lotus flower that has similar properties that may also be of se to you. I don't know if this substance is a development of that or something different.

For slow speed boats, such as kayak, dimpling on the hull is also effective. My surf shoe has a dimpled hull for smooth surfing!

*There isn't a CR4 blogger at work here. These news posts are auto generated by software, so posing questions to the blogger and expecting an answer is somewhat futile. I have no idea of the allegiance of the author of the original article to which this one links. If you want answers from him, you'd best post on his site. Or purchase the paper from here: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn303867y

Thanks for the insight about competitive reverse engineering of test data. Also, I was unaware that computer/software was most probably used to generate the brief blog info. I will surely consider the purchase of the 'paper' but for now I will just send two bits to the blog computer.