Editor's Note
This editor’s note highlights the key facts and market implications behind “Never Sticky Poop Again Thanks to Smooth Coating”, with emphasis on sourcing, product fit, fabrication, logistics, or buyer impact.
‘Leave the toilet clean.’ In most offices, employees are urgently urged to flush stool properly. But that uses quite a lot of water: 6 to 10 liters per flush.
A new, super-smooth coating allows feces to slide away so smoothly that 50 percent less water is needed.
Flushing, brushing, flushing again. It can be quite a chore to get the big job neatly into the sewer. Worldwide, 141 billion liters of water are used daily for flushing toilets.
That must be possible to improve, thought researchers at the American state university in Pennsylvania. They developed a sprayable coating that makes almost nothing stick to your ceramic toilet bowl. As a result, water use in the smallest room can be significantly reduced.
Synthetic Feces
The liquid-entrenched smooth surface (LESS) coating repels liquids, bacteria, and sticky substances. ‘That makes the toilet practically self-cleaning,’ says lead researcher Tak-Sing Wong in a press release.
The researchers demonstrated this with synthetic feces. ‘When we apply the coating to a toilet in the lab and dump synthetic feces on it, it just slides all the way down and nothing sticks,’ says Wong’s colleague Jing Wang. Simulated urine streams also bead down without leaving residues on the surface.
The researchers then dropped human feces (from three anonymous donors) onto a vertically placed surface of ceramic with Teflon, silicone, or LESS coating. Only the surface with the LESS coating showed no poop sticking in this experiment.
The research showed that up to 90 percent less water is needed to flush the synthetic poop. For flushing urine, the coating also requires less water, but the water savings here are less impressive. On average, the researchers therefore think they can save 50 percent water with their spray.
Antibacterial
Moreover, it turned out that bacteria hardly adhere to the coated surface. This means the bowl contains fewer bacteria that can be pathogenic or cause unpleasant odors. And a clean toilet bowl also means that fewer aggressive cleaning agents are needed.
The authors write that the antibacterial property of the coating could make toilets and urinals where no water flushes through safer and more attractive.
Smooth Nanohairs
The sprayable coating must be applied in two steps to a thoroughly cleaned toilet bowl. In the first step, a layer of the polymer PDMS is applied. This layer forms elongated molecules, which stick out from the surface like a kind of hairs. The hairs are a million times thinner than our own hair. The DPMS molecules are already quite repellent and form a layer from which feces and urine easily slide off. In the second step, a thin layer of lubricant (silicone oil) is sprayed over the hairs. This makes the toilet bowl even smoother.
The researchers predict that the coating will last about 500 flushes. After that, your bowl needs to be resprayed. Urine damages the layer a bit more. After 50 urination visits, the layer needs replacement.
The researchers want to bring the coating to the market via the start-up spotLESS Materials. Before that happens, the material will first be tested for environmental friendliness.
Source: Read the original article | Published: November 22, 2019