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Enhanced Adhesion by Gecko-Inspired Hierarchical Fibrillar Adhesives

2009; American Chemical Society; Volume: 1; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1021/am8002439

1944-8252

Michael Murphy, Seok Kim, Metin Sitti,

Polymer Surface Interaction Studies

The complex structures that allow geckos to repeatably adhere to surfaces consist of multilevel branching fibers with specialized tips. We present a novel technique for fabricating similar multilevel structures from polymer materials and demonstrate the fabrication of arrays of two- and three-level structures, wherein each level terminates in flat mushroom-type tips. Adhesion experiments are conducted on two-level fiber arrays on a 12-mm-diameter glass hemisphere, which exhibit both increased adhesion and interface toughness over one-level fiber samples and unstructured control samples. These adhesion enhancements are the result of increased surface conformation as well as increased extension during detachment.