Pollutant-degrading multifunctional micromotors

Abstract

This paper reports a novel fabrication technique to create pollutant-degrading, self-propelled, micro soft-robots whose surface is decorated with the high surface-area, photocatalytic ZnO nanowire array. Micromotors/microrobots with photodegradation capabilities have been reported [1], but their form is limited to spherical particles with some functional coatings (e.g. Pt for bubble-generation reactions). Here the proposed micromotor is based on a sub-millimeter, hierarchical, self-folded polymeric structure integrated with functional inorganic nanomaterials that confer desired functionalities such as photodegradation and self-propulsion. To our knowledge, this type of micromotor platform has never been published, and we believe it would provide us with an opportunity to incorporate multiple functionalities.