A consistent problem across several infrastructural fields is moisture damage. Rain and snow can create moisture damage to surfaces which are exasperated during winter months, when the surfaces can deteriorate even further due to salt and frost actions [1,2]. This is most common in pavements of the winter-region countries, such as Canada, Sweden, Russia, and Finland [3,4,5]. During the winter months, cracking damage can occur in pavements that increases the rehabilitation and maintenance costs as well as injures vehicles if left unrepaired for a long time. While current research does exist to give a solution by creating hydrophobic materials, it would not be improbable to consider superhydrophobic surfaces with a contact angle >150° [6,7,8].

Biomimicry has been used to produce superhydrophobic surfaces for various purposes. Biomimicry is the practice of replicating naturally occurring phenomena from the environment via artificial means to resolve problems or provide a service [9,10]. This has been done several times in the past through innovation and application such as the inventions of Velcro (replicating the Burdock plant’s adhesion) [11] and the bullet train’s streamlined forefront (alike the kingfisher’s beak) [12]. The replication of the lotus leaf is relatively a recent development in coating technology. Lotus leaf, specifically the Nelumbo nucifera, has the natural ability to repel water droplets at a high contact angle, thus being superhydrophobic [13,14]. Along with this, the lotus leaf utilizes its high contact angle to cause the water droplets to roll off the leaf—the rolling droplets collect any debris that the leaf contains, thus providing a naturally occurring self-cleaning property [15,16]. This is referred to as the “Lotus Effect”. This can be best demonstrated by Figure 1 below that features an image of the lotus leaf containing several water droplets which have not contracted but remained buoyant.

Researchers are recently trying to use nanotechnology in coordination with biomimicry. As the term suggests, nanotechnology is the application of materials, which fit between 1 and 100 nm that can affect the properties, interactions, and conditions of materials on a nano scale [17]. In nanotechnology, the properties of materials are dictated by the fundamental behavior of atoms [18,19] due to the technology’s ability to capture electrons. The biomimicry attempts to replicate the micro-nano surface structure of the lotus leaf in coating materials to perform with superhydrophobic capability. Biomimetic superhydrophobic and self-cleaning surfaces have already been developed using the natural lotus leaf as a model [20,21].