Ladybug Inspired Double‐Layered Adhesive with Enhanced Robustness of Surface Roughness

Abstract

AbstractSurface flexibility and structure stability are two design considerations and opposing sides for biologically‐inspired dry adhesives in real world. Here a ladybug inspired adhesive with double‐layered structure is presented to solve this problem. The bottom layer is made of magnetorheological elastomers (MREs) and the top layer is made of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) with controllable Young's modulus and thickness. To investigate the adaptability of the double‐layered adhesives to surface roughness, silicon wafers are polished to achieve various surface roughness. The adhesion performance of composite structure is characterized by using a mechanical testing machine with the target Si surfaces. The experiment results indicate double‐layered adhesive shows good surface adaptation and robustness to different surface roughness with approximately 3 N/cm2 adhesion stress. This work shows the adhesion performance of double‐layered dry adhesive considering the real world surface and illustrates that the mechanical properties of the biomimetic adhesives have a significant impact on their adhesion performance.