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Soft Fibrous Structures in Nature as Liquid Catcher

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Abstract

Past decades have witnessed the explosive growth of interest in the field of bio-inspired materials, of which the structures and properties can be well utilized for industrial and bioengineering applications. Among these structures, the natural fibrous structures propose diverse strategies to adapt to their environment, offering inspirations for versatile applications, especially droplet manipulation. With various well-adapted soft structures and materials, these fibrous structures show good control over their interaction with liquids (e.g., water), providing a database full of effective solutions to these droplet-related scientific and technical problems (e.g., colloidal synthesis, single-cell gene sequencing, drug delivery and solution synthesis). In this review, the current achievements in water collection by multiple fibrous structures are highlighted; the structures, basic models, bio-inspired structures and their applications are presented; and the current challenges and future prospects for the development of bio-inspired fibrous structures are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (11532009, 11522219).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory for Strength and Vibration of Mechanical Structures, School of Aerospace, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Moxiao Li

  2. Bioinspired Engineering and Biomechanics Center (BEBC), Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Moxiao Li, Tianjian Lu & Feng Xu

  3. State Key Laboratory of Mechanics and Control of Mechanical Structures, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, China

    Tianjian Lu

  4. Nanjing Center for Multifunctional Lightweight Materials and Structures (MLMS), Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, China

    Tianjian Lu

  5. The Key Laboratory of Biomedical Information Engineering of the Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Feng Xu

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  1. Moxiao Li
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Correspondence to Feng Xu.

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Li, M., Lu, T. & Xu, F. Soft Fibrous Structures in Nature as Liquid Catcher. Acta Mech. Solida Sin. 32, 580–590 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10338-019-00102-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10338-019-00102-w

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