Wearable electronic textiles that store capacitive energy are a next frontier in personalized electronics. However, the lack of industrially weavable and knittable conductive yarns in conjunction with high capacitance, limits the wide-scale application of such textiles. Here pristine soft conductive yarns are continuously produced by a scalable method with the use of twist-bundle-drawing technique, and are mechanically robust enough to be knitted to a cloth by a commercial cloth knitting machine. Subsequently, the reduced-graphene-oxide-modified conductive yarns covered with a hierarchical structure of MnO2 nanosheets and a polypyrrole thin film were used to fabricate weavable, knittable and wearable yarn supercapacitors. The resultant modified yarns exhibit specific capacitances as high as 36.6 mF cm(-1) and 486 mF cm(-2) in aqueous electrolyte (three-electrode cell) or 31 mF cm(-1) and 411 mF cm(-2) in all solid-state two-electrode cell. The symmetric solid-state supercapacitor has high energy densities of 0.0092 mWh cm(-2) and 1.1 mWh cm(-3) (both normalized to the whole device) with a long cycle life. Large energy storage textiles are fabricated by weaving our flexible all-solid-state supercapacitor yarns to a 15 cm × 10 cm cloth on a loom and knitting in a woollen wrist band to form a pattern, enabling dual functionalities of energy storage capability and wearability.

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Evaporation of a sessile droplet is a complex, nonequilibrium phenomenon. Although evaporating droplets upon superhydrophobic surfaces have been known to exhibit distinctive evaporation modes such as a constant contact line (CCL), a constant contact angle (CCA), or both, our fundamental understanding of the effects of surface roughness on the wetting transition remains elusive. We show that the onset time for the CCL-CCA transition and the critical base size at the Cassie-Wenzel transition exhibit remarkable dependence on the surface roughness. Through global interfacial energy analysis we reveal that, when the size of the evaporating droplet becomes comparable to the surface roughness, the line tension at the triple line becomes important in the prediction of the critical base size. Last, we show that both the CCL evaporation mode and the Cassie-Wenzel transition can be effectively inhibited by engineering a surface with hierarchical roughness.

Droplet impacting on solid or liquid interfaces is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. Although complete rebound of droplets is widely observed on superhydrophobic surfaces, the bouncing of droplets on liquid is usually vulnerable due to easy collapse of entrapped air pocket underneath the impinging droplet. Here, we report a superhydrophobic-like bouncing regime on thin liquid film, characterized by the contact time, the spreading dynamics, and the restitution coefficient independent of underlying liquid film. Through experimental exploration and theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that the manifestation of such a superhydrophobic-like bouncing necessitates an intricate interplay between the Weber number, the thickness and viscosity of liquid film. Such insights allow us to tune the droplet behaviours in a well-controlled fashion. We anticipate that the combination of superhydrophobic-like bouncing with inherent advantages of emerging slippery liquid interfaces will find a wide range of applications.

Nanostructured surfaces which manifest superhydrophobic properties during water condensation have a potential to dramatically enhance energy efficiency in power generation and desalination systems. Although various such surfaces have been reported, their development has been fortuitous, not driven by an understanding of the underlying physical processes. In this work, we perform a comprehensive study of microscale water condensation dynamics on nanostructured superhydrophobic surfaces made using a variety of synthetic methods. We demonstrate that the growth mechanism of individual water microdroplets on these surfaces is universal and independent of the surface architecture. The key role of the nanoscale topography is confinement of the base area of forming droplets, which allows droplets to grow only through contact angle increase. The nearly spherical droplets formed in this fashion become highly mobile after coalescence. By comparing experimentally observed drop growth with interface free energy calculations, we show that the minimum observed confined microdroplet base diameter depends directly on the nanoscale surface roughness and degree of interfacial wetting. Specifically, we show that the microscale condensation mechanism depends on the height of a liquid film with volume equal to the fill volume between the nanostructures. This introduced roughness length scale is a universal metric that allows for facile comparison of arbitrarily complex surface architectures. We use this new fundamental insight to develop quantitative design guidelines for superhydrophobic surfaces intended for condensation applications.