The authors discussed the potential reasons why the lotus leaf is so strong by means of scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The results showed that the good mechanical properties of lotus leaf should be attributed to its architecture, such as paralleled microtubes structure, umbrellalike structure, and hierarchically layered hexagon structure. The important observation from this work is that the surface of the rear face of the lotus leaf seems to be constituted by the layers of hexagons whose hierarchical pilling up of size decreases as we go deeper from surface. This is a typical fractal-like phenomenon.
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