What factors affect lotus effect?

Abstract

Lotus effect is the superhydrophobicity property, and widely used for self-cleaning in modern textile engineering. This paper reveals that the lotus effect is a kind of nanoeffect or size effect in nanotechnology, the surface morphology, solution's molecule weight, and temperature are three main factors affecting the lotus effect. Solutions' pH values or ionic liquids are also discussed in this paper. A series of experiments are carried out to measure contact angles for different solutions/liquids on the lotus surface at different temperature.