Underwater drag reduction via self-healing and robust air plastrons stabilized by candle soot-based coatings
Muhammad Imran Jamil, Arshia Komal, Mehboob Hassan, Mazloom Shah, Waqar Ahmed, Hafiz Muhammad Ali, Numan Ahmed, Fazal Haq, Sahid Mehmood, Shahid Iqbal, Meznah M. Alanazi, Shaimaa A. M. Abdelmohsen · 2026
Read Underwater drag reduction via self-healing and robust air plastrons stabilized by candle soot-based coatings by Muhammad Imran Jamil, Arshia Komal, Mehboob Hassan, Mazloom Shah, Waqar Ahmed, Hafiz Muhammad Ali, Numan Ahmed, Fazal Haq, Sahid Mehmood, Shahid Iqbal, Meznah M. Alanazi, Shaimaa A. M. Abdelmohsen (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13177182.txt.
Description
Muhammad Imran Jamil and co-authors coat surfaces with candle soot to let hulls and rotors slip through water on a cushion of air. Superhydrophobic coatings cut drag by holding such an air layer, the plastron, but pressure and chemistry collapse it in cold seas, and the benefit drowns. Their 2026 paper embeds soot nanoparticles in an elastic binder, making a porous coat whose air pockets can heal.
The soot's web of nanopores grips the air layer hard. A coated copper ball carried a gas cavity nearly fifteen times the bare ball's volume on hitting water, and its drag coefficient fell near zero. In swirling flow between cylinders, a coated rotor cut drag by sixty percent, and flow resistance dropped about fifteen percent in rheology tests. The authors pitch soot, of all things, as a marine technology.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Muhammad Imran Jamil, Arshia Komal, Mehboob Hassan, Mazloom Shah, Waqar Ahmed, Hafiz Muhammad Ali, Numan Ahmed, Fazal Haq, Sahid Mehmood, Shahid Iqbal, Meznah M. Alanazi, Shaimaa A. M. Abdelmohsen |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 53 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |