If you've ever taken a long drive at night and then seen the massacre of bugs that smashed against your car's front end and windshield, then you know NASA's pain. The space agency has been testing a variety of materials to find one that will keep bugs off of airplane wings. Now they think they've found the secret in the water-repellant properties of the lotus leaf.
When bugs meet their untimely demise by smacking into a vehicle, the blood and guts take on an especially sticky quality that makes it hard to remove and creates more drag. At times that could even endanger an aircraft if it were to encounter an especially large swarms of insects. Teflon isn't quite the answer for keeping aircraft and spacecraft surfaces bug-free, NASA has found. Instead, its new report says that the solution is to create a microscopically bumpy surface.
Lotus leaves—and dozens of other plants, actually—have microscopic bumps along their surface that, while invisible to our eyes, makes them feel rough. It helps their leaves remain free of muck and grime, which would otherwise block valuable sunlight. This landscape of spiked growths repels fluids with amazing efficiency, and scientists have been borrowing the concept for decades. In fact, plenty of hydrophobic materials are based on the same surface structure.
When the bugs collide with the lotus-inspired surface, the structure is such that they don't get a chance to implant on it and stick, especially compared to a smoother surface. This technique was the winner of NASA's tests done so far and will now undergo more rigorous testing. If it all pans out, soon planes will come with non-stick wings that will keep themselves much cleaner– all thanks to a pond-growing plant.