A Novel Method for Fabrication of the Biomimetic Shark-Skin Coating

The shark-skin effect motivated from the dermal surface morphology of sharks hastens the imitation and manufacture of the non-smooth drag reduction bionic coating based on shark skin. The fabrication of the bionic shark-skin coating with life-sized scale-like microstructure was presented in this paper. Using hot embossing technology, the direct micro replication of the microstructure on shark skin was investigated for the first time. Modeled after the shark skin sample, the negative structure was directly replicated and printed on PMMA flat plate in the hot embossing process, relied on which the bionic shark-skin coating made of silica gel was fabricated in the end. The preliminary experiment results indicate that this method is a high precision, high throughput, high efficiency and low cost way to fabricate bionic microstructure in micron and submicron scale with good repeatability and availability.