Self-cleaning and anti-fogging hierarchical structure arrays inspired by termite wing

Wings of the Formosan subterranean termite (Coptotermes formosanus Shiraki) covered with micrometer-scale hairs and nanometer-scale wax patches, allow them to greatly reduce adhesions to water droplets of various sizes. Inspired by the anti-wetting structures, we develop a colloidal lithography-based strategy integrated with a scalable self-assembly approach to engineer hierarchical conical structure arrays. The resulting structure arrays provided a water contact angle as high as 175.3 degrees and a low contact angle hysteresis of 2.7 degrees after surface modification. Importantly, the resulting superhydrophobic structures even feature distinguished self-cleaning and anti-fogging capabilities. The dependence of structure configuration on the anti-wetting functionalities is also investigated in this research.