Abstract
Recently, shape-tunable wrinkles formed on an elastomeric sheet with a textile finely embedded in proximity to the surface have been developed for in situ control of friction depending on various situations. For their actual uses, sheets with a large area are desired. A key challenge on their fabrication is to overcome the non-uniformity of the vertical position of the textile embedded within the elastomeric sheet, which causes substantial reduction in the tunable range of friction. The defect originates from the increased difficulty, as the sheet area is scaled up, of squeezing a viscoelastic precursor liquid due to the use of a deformable elastomeric surface. Here, we report a new two-step method for a textile-embedded elastomeric sheet that avoids using the soft elastomeric surface on the squeezing process and requires post-joining to an elastomeric base sheet. The obtained sheet with a large area (180 × 180 mm), was uniform and showed a large change of friction on its strain-induced transformation between flat and wrinkled states. The relationship between the experimentally controllable parameters and the squeeze film hydrodynamics is theoretically discussed, which is generally applicable to precise embedding micro-objects at the elastomer surface.
Highlights
Soft materials such as rubber and plastics have been used in many tribological [1,2,3] applications with relatively non-severe contacts at the interfaces [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16], including grips on tools and housewares
A new two-step method is presented, and we show that it enables the fine positional control of the embedded textile sheet at the proximity surface of the soft elastic substrate with a large area
We report a new two-step method to fabricate the shape-tunable textile-embedded elastomeric sheet with an area larger than 100 Â 100 mm2 and explain our observations with a mechanism that governs the dynamics of the squeeze film problem
Summary
Soft materials such as rubber and plastics have been used in many tribological [1,2,3] applications with relatively non-severe contacts at the interfaces [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16], including grips on tools and housewares. The shape 2 tunability has been realized by the buckling-based surface wrinkling [22]. Using a certain type of shape-tunable wrinkles [23,24,25], various applications, other than tribological ones, including optical elements [26] and patterning of liquids [27,28], have been demonstrated. We have recently reported that a switchable hierarchical microstructure induced on a textile-embedded elastomer surface can remarkably change the friction depending on whether the surface is flat or wrinkled [19,20]; at low normal load, the friction coefficient on the flat surface of approximately 1.0 can be changed to approximately 0.1 by inducing the hierarchical microstructure
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
