CAO Weilong, a postgraduate student of CALM (first author), Dr. YU Wenhui (corresponding authors) and Professor ZHENG Hongyu, published a paper entitled “Water flow tuned by micro/nano hierarchical structures fabricated through two-photon polymerization” in Materials Science in Additive Manufacturing (doi.org/10.36922/msam.0879).

Two-photon polymerization (TPP) is a sub-classification of vat photopolymerization. It has been widely used to fabricate micro/nano hierarchical structures that have the potential to be used to tune the fluid flow in chips. The present work first studied the influence of laser power on the feature size of TPP-fabricated 2D structures. It was found that the increase of laser power from 1.0 μW to 1.4 μW leads to the feature size increasing from 203 nm to 307 nm. Then, the effect of scanning parameters on the accuracy and surface quality of 3D structures was investigated. The arrangement of the voxels at different scanning strategies explains the mechanisms of the variation of accuracy and surface roughness. Finally, the pinecone structures with micro/nano hierarchical features were built and evaluated for their water repellence. The increase in the number of rows of pinecone structures significantly enhances the water-repellent performance.

Figure 1 Illustration of (A) the voxel size at various laser powers; (B) voxel arrangement at various scanning parameters; and (C) voxel arrangement at different scanning strategies.