Bioinspired Transport Surface Driven By Air Flow

Directional transportation as is a common phenomenon in nature, has significant potential in advanced devices and technology. Most of the studies focus on the directional transport of water on an anisotropic surface with gradients in Laplace pressure. However, rare attentions are paid to on-demand transportation of macroscale object on static microscale anisotropic structure. Herein, bioinspired by the phenomenon that the breath air promotes the mucus gel transport in trachea, a transport system by combining static microcilia with anisotropic structure, water layer, and air-blowing device, realizing directional transport of macroscale object under air flow is fabricated. Owing to the anisotropic friction, the anisotropic microcilia arrays achieve transporting centi-scale hydrogel slice when air flow along their tilted direction. In contrast, air flow against their tilted direction results in hard transport. By introducing cobalt nanoparticles into microcilia, the transport direction can also be easy tuned by regulating the magnetic field. This contribution should expand more properties and functions of anisotropic surface, and provides a clue to design the next generation of micro-electromechanical systems.