With this invention, traditional porcelain and ceramic toilet bowls will disappear…
Maintaining toilets is a real chore. Who hasn’t complained when they found traces of excrement adhering to the toilet bowl? Who hasn’t dreamed of a miracle product that would avoid using brushes and elbow grease every time you clean? Not to mention the amount of water wasted when several flushes are necessary to definitively dislodge this pesky turd which resists again and again… Friends of the impeccable, white and shiny toilet bowl, know that science is thinking of you and is moving forward to big steps forward on this oh-so-important subject for humanity!
Be careful, “this is a revolution”: scientists are working on a new coating with an ultra-slippery surface. Traditional porcelain and ceramic toilet bowls could therefore be on the verge of disappearing. In any case, this is the promise of a team from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in China. She has already demonstrated these findings via a 3D printed model of a non-stick toilet bowl.
How does this innovation work? The super slippery, abrasion-resistant toilet bowl, called ARSFT, was designed to repel fecal matter. Several synthetic substances were tested by scientists to compose this magical coating. They ultimately used a mixture of plastic and hydrophobic grains of sand for their material, fused together using 3D printing techniques. Everything was tested under draconian conditions via a real model of our good old toilet bowl, but in reduced size: a tenth of the size of a standard toilet bowl!
The result is impressive. Several tests have shown that nothing sticks to the surface, everything slides towards the bottom of the bowl. Experiments with various materials, more or less sticky and close to our fecal matter, have even been carried out. “ARSFT remains clean after being in contact with various liquids such as milk, yogurt, very sticky honey, demonstrating excellent repellency to complex fluids,” the researchers write in their paper published in Advanced Engineering Materials. And this result is lasting, explain the scientists. Even after “1000 cycles of abrasion using sandpaper”, the bowl retains its super slipperiness.
An innovation which could be of great service to us for cleaning toilets, this much hated household task, but above all make a difference in countries which do not have access to running water or for which water cannot continue to be continually wasted in our toilets. A little more patience, all that remains is to wait for the concept to be developed and scaled before seeing it arrive here.
