Super Adhesive - Science - Thomson Reuters

SUPER ADHESIVE
PROFESSOR ANIMANGSU GHATAK – KANPUR, INDIA

My work is inspired by the toe pads of tree frogs and crickets, and we have created a form of sticky coating that is both strong and reusable.

Most people experience the same problem every day with normal adhesive tape — that when it is pulled off a surface the tape quickly loses its stickiness. This is because of cracks that form on the tape, which also picks up dust and other particles.

By looking at how tree frogs continually 'stick' to surfaces within their habitat we found that their toe pads are not smooth, they actually have patterns on the surface and that underneath these patterns, there are fluid vessels, glands and blood vessels.

Sticky tape gets contaminated with dust and you only use it once or twice but lizards and frogs use their toes all the time. They don't get contaminated and they create very strong adhesion. We are trying to mimic that function by recreating this material.

By adding tiny fluid vessels in our model adhesive we have found that the quality of adhesion is increased by 30 times. This is due to the capillary pressure in these fluid vessels.

We hope to use our new technology on adhesive devices that are meant to be reused. One application is for stickers on utensils or fruit, where you want to remove them cleanly and you don't want the adhesive to remain behind.

Our continued research work on adhesion is going well. In the last four months we have shown that it is possible to generate strong adhesion under water. It is possible also to create directional adhesion using liquid filled microchannels.

Beside adhesion, in a recently published work we have shown that embedded microchannels may be key to the dynamic stability of many insects during locomotion.

Web of Science is very useful for finding out relevant literature for our research work. It is useful also to find out the papers which are citing my own paper and thus helps us to keep in contact with the scientific community. My students and I use it very regularly for these purposes.

In next few months one of my students who is working on microfluidic adhesion will graduate, so I would like to see a logical conclusion to this work. In the next phase we will explore how these bio-inspired adhesives can be made into practical applications, like adhesion to metal-polymer and fibrous interfaces and adhesion on tissue.