Professor Xiaobo Yin of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and his team worked on the research for the topic “Selective directional liquid transport on shoot surfaces of Crassula muscosa”. The research findings were recently published in Science on June 20, 2024.
Details of the publication:
Selective directional liquid transport on shoot surfaces of Crassula muscosa
Ling Yang, Wei Li, Jiaoyuan Lian, Hengjia Zhu, Qiyu Deng, Yiyuan Zhang, Jiaqian Li, Xiaobo Yin, and Liqiu Wang, article in Science
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adk4180
Abstract
Directional liquid transport has been widely observed in various species including cacti, spiders, lizards, the pitcher plant Nepenthes alata, and Araucaria leaves. However, in all these examples the liquid transport for a specific liquid is completely restricted in a fixed direction. We demonstrate that Crassula muscosa shoot surfaces have the ability to transport a specific liquid unidirectionally in either direction. This is accomplished through the presence of asymmetric reentrant leaves with varying reentrant angles, which yields the variation in liquid meniscus heterogeneity. These findings enable engineered biomimetic structures capable of selective directional liquid transport, with functions such as intelligent flow direction switching, liquid distribution, and mixing.