ANY child can make a butterfly print, but doing so on an industrial scale is far from child's play.
Butterfly wings - and lotus leaves - are able to repel water with ease because of the microstructures on their surface. The densely packed microscopic bumps of the lotus leaf and the waffle-like structures found on butterfly wings both make it difficult for water droplets to spread out. As a result, the drops roll off, and they take dirt with them. This makes the surfaces ideal as the basis for self-cleaning windows and windshields.
However, creating such surfaces is tough because it means creating a template using lithographic techniques usually reserved for chip making. This makes it costly and slow, and limits the size of surfaces that can be produced, says Christophe Peroz at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Aubervilliers.
So he and his colleagues developed a cheaper ...
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