. Maybe for now if you want bubbles you can go with Michael “Bublé” songs until the spring. While “I need more power Scotty” might be the order, you can actually see the magnetic effect on water using garden variety rare earth magnets that consume zero energy. I love free stuff.
The surface finish of paint is controlled by chemical additives, and the spray can section of the hardware store has lots of different finishes right out of the can (wrinkle, crackle, hammertone etc). So I would guess they can play with the texture on VC-17 somewhat.
I developed and built a production line that could continuously form a roll of shape-memory polymer (“memory plastic”) into a spiral-wound coil (much like a Damascus gun barrel, overlapping), then cool it, and wind it back up into another roll. Of course, since it now has a memory, that roll had to be constrained or it would “explode” back into a long spiral-wound tube if you released it. Kinda like a magic trick, or “pop goes the weasel”, except somebody could lose an eye.
Laminated on the outside surface of the polymer tube was a layer of various materials being tested, one of them being Teflon, which I referenced in the previous post. The effect of surface finish on the hydrophobicity (is that a word
?) of the Teflon is quite simple…The level of repulsion is related to the surface area being acted on (obvious). So a smooth, flat, one-inch square surface repels water over a water area of one square inch. If that same surface is textured, rough, or wavy , the surface area of the interface between the two increases as well, within that same square inch, and so does the hydrophobicness (is that a word
? ). That’s it. Sorry if I disappointed anyone with such a simple explanation, maybe I oversold the concept,
misrepresented the product ? I much prefer things that are counter-intuitive (that’s a word 
!). -Brian.
