Researchers have invented a stainless steel mesh, which — scaled up — could separate oil and water for less than $1 per square foot.

Ohio State engineering professor Bharat Bhushan unveiled the technology on the fifth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster. “People normally clean up spills with cloth or toxic chemicals to break up the oil. Here we can use the same mesh over and over,” he says. “This could be a very cheap and ecologically friendly solution.”

Lotus flowers inspired this breakthrough. “Microbumps are part of the leaf’s structure,” he explains. “Wax protrudes from them, like branches off a tree trunk, and helps repel water.” From this jumping-off point, Bhushan layered on tiny pieces of glass and molecules of surfactant, which gives cleaning power to soap and detergent. The result: a half-smooth, half-rough nanomesh that attracts oil, which could hit the market in three to five years and be a game changer for deadly marine spills.

Such coatings could have other applications too, such as stopping ice on car mirrors and fog on eyeglasses. “We’ve studied many natural surfaces — from shark skin to gecko feet and butterfly wings — to understand how nature solves certain challenges,” Bhushan says. “Now we want to go beyond what nature does in order to solve new problems.

“It’s the perfect model to emulate. This is really green science and green technology.”