| Abstract |
Termite’s dispersal season occur in different seasons, during heavy rain, before and after the rain, or even in sunny days. Since the flight period of time is very short (~30 minutes), we speculate that the physical properties of termite wing surface are associated with the climatic conditions at the time of flight. In this project, we will analyze climatic information when termite flights occur in various microhabitat. Climatic information including rainfall, altitude, and temperature and humidity. Analyze the structural and hydrophobicity properties of termite wing surfaces to demonstrate the relationship between the termite wing structure and environmental factors. 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 large water contact angle and a low contact angle hysteresis 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. |
