Ultrahydrophobic coating, applied with paintguns

[Bear Naff]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPM8OR6W6WE

I know it's the sci-fi nerd in me, but this stuff MUST be applied to low-water-usage toilets immediately!  I want a Motie toilet!

[Mark Sullivan]

> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPM8OR6W6WE

Amazing. Especially the puddle of water corralled on a pane of glass.

But it gave me a sort of Ice-9 kind of creepy feeling. What happens
when every consumer product is coated and it starts getting into the waste stream?

Dr Boom

[Chris Holloway]

I wonder if there are any medical applications for this.  Coated arteries so the cholesterol just slides right off!

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[Jeremy Southard]

The video said you could coat "almost anything" with it...I wonder about discrete electronics.  If coated in this stuff, would they still short out in water?

--

Thanks,

Jeremy Southard

Wastex Games

http://www.WastexGames.com

[Bear Naff]

Only if they can arc across the tiny spark gap, I'm guessing.

[Brian Dawson]

"...I wonder about discrete electronics..."

In my misreading that, it made me think of a pourable discrete/hidden circuit board.  Kind of like a Indiana Jones type puzzle for a science fair, where a number of items could be set up on a piece of plywood (battery in one area, light in another, sensors in yet another), and people could then pour saline stained with food coloring onto the board, making a visible circuit.

[Brian Dawson]

discreet...showing off my bad spelling skills :)

[Mark Sullivan]

I think you were right the first time:

discrete = transistors vs integrated circuits
discreet = not tweeting naked pictures of yourself

- Mark -

[Patrick Wheeler]

I did experiments with self assembled SIO2 based coatings to produce super hydrophobic surfaces in one of my undergraduate summer research projects.  The trick with super hydrophobic coatings has always been to get them to be durable and non-toxic if want to use them where anything ingestible is being used. It would be interesting to see how durable this particular coating is.

Also some super hydrophobic coatings fail to work when completely submerged, after some time has elapsed, so do not work with applications like boats and toilets where they stay submerge for long periods of time unfortunately.

It does not look super expensive $60 per quart. If anyone wants to play around with it.

Patrick Wheeler
Patrick.Jo...@gmail.com
Patrick....@rice.edu
Patrick...@colorado.edu

[Forrest Flanagan]

I'd like to see what kind of applications it has in microfluidics. I'm wondering if the coating can be applied in two passes with a piezoelectric inkjet printer.

There's a technology I've been seeing snippets of lately where a microtextures surface is impregnated with a liquid lubricant. As opposed to being repellent to liquids and oils, the lubricant and porous substrate are chosen to be slippery for a specific substance; there is no air cushion to degrade. A company called liquiglide out of MIT wants to use it to coat product packaging: http://www.liqui-glide.com/applications/

Liquiglide isn't commercially available yet, so this air-cushion spray on coating looks really attractive.

[Brian Dawson]

There is a fair amount of information suggesting that 'nano' stuff is super bad for your lungs. Please be extra careful where it is applied and use proper protection.

One article on spray coatings.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2886856/

[Forrest Flanagan]

Any small particles are bad for your lungs. I am counter to the idea that the prefix 'nano' makes small particles inherently more dangerous to breath.

[Brian Dawson]

I think there is an argument to be made that the smaller the particle, the less equipped are bodies are to deal with it. I think there is a chance that carbon nanotubes are in line to be the next asbestos.

[David Lewis]

I wonder what kind of temperature stability this stuff has and is it oil, glue, and molten plastic phobic as well.

[Bear Naff]

Fortunately, carbon nanotubes have a weakness that asbestos lacks - our carbon-based metabolism.  Even if there's nothing specific in our bodies that breaks down nanotubes, there are processes that should cut them down and unravel them.  Nanotubes are pretty darn fragile for their you-gotta-be-cheating tensile strength.

[Brian Dawson]

It would be nice if this were so.

"The underlying mechanisms of CNT toxicity include oxidative stress, inflammatory responses, malignant transformation, DNA damage and mutation (errors in chromosome number as well as disruption of the mitotic spindle), the formation of granulomas, and interstitial fibrosis."
http://www-ncbi-nlm-nih-gov.ezproxyhost.library.tmc.edu/pubmed/22999420

There have been some articles that discuss that one of the ways a nanotube can cause trouble is by approaching a cell and presenting a small enough area that the cell attempts to surround it, and by the time it realizes how long the nanotube is, the cell is doomed. 

I am not anti-nano and anti-new materials.  I am just concerned that these technologies are available before there is full understanding of the health risks.  The end product will likely be quite safe, but the risk to those manufacturing these products is likely quite high. When we, TX/RX, and others, start to use sprays or materials that contain these particles, we are taking on the roll of a manufacturer and not an end user.  I worry that there might be a temptation to be cavalier about safety with these products, and this could put others in the area at serious risk. 

Don't forget that even artificial butter flavoring flavoring can cause serious harm to the person that is working with it at a manufacturing level:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bronchiolitis_obliterans#Diacetyl_.28popcorn_workers_lung.29

[Brian Dawson]

Sorry, here's a non-proxy link:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ar300028m

[Brian Dawson]

Looks like there is a paywall for the links.

Here is an interesting and free article:

The New Toxicology of Sophisticated Materials: Nanotoxicology and Beyond
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3145386/

[Marlin]

I wonder if it would be workable for grafitti?  They have that detergent grafitti where you selectively clean part of the wall with a message.  Now you can make a steel-wall selectively hydrophobic.

On Friday, February 8, 2013 2:47:09 AM UTC-6, Bear Naff wrote: