New palm-sized adhesive device can make you Spider Man!

ANI

Washington

Tue, 02 Feb 2010: 

Washington, Feb 2 (ANI): Your dream of scaling up the wall just like web slinging superhero Spider Man may soon be a reality, thanks to Cornell researchers who have developed an adhesive device that can make it possible.

 

Invented by Paul Steen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and Micha Vogel, a former postdoctoral associate, the rapid adhesion mechanism could lead to such applications as shoes or gloves that stick and unstick to walls, or Post-it-like notes that can bear loads.

 

The device is inspired by a beetle native to Florida, which can adhere to a leaf with a force 100 times its own weight, yet also instantly unstick itself.

 

It consists of a flat plate patterned with holes, each on the order of microns (one-millionth of a meter).

 

A bottom plate holds a liquid reservoir, and in the middle is another porous layer.

 

An electric field applied by a common 9-volt battery pumps water through the device and causes droplets to squeeze through the top layer.

 

The surface tension of the exposed droplets makes the device grip another surface - much the way two wet glass slides stick together.

 

"In our everyday experience, these forces are relatively weak," Steen said.

 

"But if you make a lot of them and can control them, like the beetle does, you can get strong adhesion forces," he added.

 

For example, one of the researchers' prototypes was made with about 1,000 300-micron-sized holes, and it can hold about 30 grams - more than 70 paper clips.

 

They found that as they scaled down the holes and packed more of them onto the device, the adhesion got stronger.

 

They estimate, then, that a one-square-inch device with millions of 1-micron-sized holes could hold more than 15 pounds.

 

To turn the adhesion off, the electric field is simply reversed, and the water is pulled back through the pores, breaking the tiny "bridges" created between the device and the other surface by the individual droplets.

 

The study appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (ANI)