Abstract
Bio-inspired reversible adhesion has significant potential in many fields requiring flexible grasping and manipulation, such as precision manufacturing, flexible electronics, and intelligent robotics. Despite extensive efforts for adhesive synthesis with a high adhesion strength at the interface, an effective strategy to actively tune the adhesion capacity between a strong attachment and an easy detachment spanning a wide range of scales has been lagged. Herein, we report a novel soft-hard-soft sandwiched composite design to achieve a stable, repeatable, and reversible strong adhesion with an easily scalable performance for a large area ranging from ∼1.5 to 150 cm2 and a high load ranging from ∼20 to 700 N. Theoretical studies indicate that this design can enhance the uniform loading for attachment by restraining the lateral shrinkage in the natural state, while facilitate a flexible peeling for detachment by causing stress concentration in the bending state, yielding an adhesion switching ratio of ∼54 and a switching time of less than ∼0.2 s. This design is further integrated into versatile grippers, climbing robots, and human climbing grippers, demonstrating its robust scalability for a reversible strong adhesion. This biomimetic design bridges microscopic interfacial interactions with macroscopic controllable applications, providing a universal and feasible paradigm for adhesion design and control.
Highlights
IntroductionAdhesion is a ubiquitous interfacial phenomenon found in nature (e.g., in geckos and spiders) and daily life (e.g., adhesives and glue), spanning a wide spatial scale of several orders of magnitude, such as nanoscopic gecko spatula, microscopic cell adhesion, and macroscopic building coating [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Adhesion is a ubiquitous interfacial phenomenon found in nature and daily life, spanning a wide spatial scale of several orders of magnitude, such as nanoscopic gecko spatula, microscopic cell adhesion, and macroscopic building coating [1,2,3,4,5,6]
By combining the strong adhesive interactions at the interface and the controllable loading behaviors from the back, we report an extremely simple but effective design, namely, a peeling-based sandwiched composite unit (PSCU), to simultaneously realize stiff-backing strengthened pulling and flexible sequential peeling for a reversible strong adhesion with a scalable performance
Summary
Adhesion is a ubiquitous interfacial phenomenon found in nature (e.g., in geckos and spiders) and daily life (e.g., adhesives and glue), spanning a wide spatial scale of several orders of magnitude, such as nanoscopic gecko spatula, microscopic cell adhesion, and macroscopic building coating [1,2,3,4,5,6] It is mainly determined by intermolecular interactions at the interface, which are affected by the intrinsic material properties (e.g., surface energy and Young’s modulus) and geometric structural properties (e.g., layer thickness and shape of the structure) [7,8,9,10]. The experimental results show that this design can produce a strong adhesion by preventing crack propagation through equal load sharing It can be released by causing a stress concentration through sequential edge peeling. | https://mc03.manuscriptcentral.com/friction in applicable technologies demanding tunable interfacial behaviors
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