Sticky fingers
By Alexandra Hay
When I was a kid one of my favourite games was Spiderman. It was a time of innocence, before political correctness made me wonder if I should change my name to Spider girl-slash-woman-slash-insert gender neutral description here, before I realised that climbing up buildings was in disappointingly few job descriptions. I would leap from couch to coffee table, trying to swing off lamps and bookcases in order to save the world (or more often then not, my stuffed pink pig). Unfortunately, reality took hold and no matter how strong my desire to crawl up towering buildings, “window washer” was never going to be a job description to which I would be drawn.
I can’t even begin to describe how thrilled I was to stumble on a press release from BAE Systems announcing: NEW SUPER ADHESIVE INSPIRED BY GECKO’S STICKING POWER.
My mind raced. Just think of all the amazing things I could do with a super adhesive! I could climb up walls! I could save the world! I could change that light bulb on the outside of my house which has been burnt out for the last 9 months… ok, maybe not what my childhood imagination had concocted, but still, ever practical.
You can imagine just how many applications the BAE researchers came up with when they realised they had developed an adhesive which could stick a one tonne car to the ceiling by using just a meter square of the stuff.
The inspiration for the research didn’t come from an overload of comic books as one might suspect, but from the unassuming gecko. Geckos have footpads which allow them to crawl up vertical surfaces made of a huge array of materials and even across ceilings. They do this without a sticky adhesive but instead rely on tiny hairs covering the foot surface to help them stick. The feet are covered will millions and millions of these tiny hairs that split at the end, with the ends developing into mushroom shapes. The end of each split hair is less than one thousandth of a millimetre across. Due to the tiny size of the hairs, the geckos foot is very close to the surface it is trying to crawl across and this means that the molecular forces of attraction as dictated by Van der Waals principles take effect, and the Gecko will stick. The gecko releases itself simply by peeling its foot off the surface, breaking the molecular attraction.
BAE scientists imitated this interaction by putting down layers of thousands of polyimide stalks with splayed tips mimicking those found on geckos. They were successful and now steps are being taken to research the effect of surface texture and moisture on the adhesive’s effectiveness.
This adhesive possibly has endless use. BAE could use the product for things such as repair patches on their aircraft and machines, new building materials, super grip materials, and for rapid attachment of armour panels. But besides military applications the possibilities are endless.
Construction workers and window washers could have suits to help them climb up buildings, Emergency shelters could be put up rapidly, houses could be shored up before hurricanes, IKEA could use it on their flat pack furniture instead of nails and screws, it could be used to set bones and maybe, just maybe, it could stop my posters falling off the wall every night.
Alex Hay caught up with Drs Sajad Haq and Jeff Sargent who head up the investigations. Read the interview here.
And if you still want more, read about this and other inventions inspired by nature: check out our review of The Gecko’s Foot by Peter Forbes.
My mind raced. Just think of all the amazing things I could do with a super adhesive! I could climb up walls! I could save the world! I could change that light bulb on the outside of my house which has been burnt out for the last 9 months… ok, maybe not what my childhood imagination had concocted, but still, ever practical.
You can imagine just how many applications the BAE researchers came up with when they realised they had developed an adhesive which could stick a one tonne car to the ceiling by using just a meter square of the stuff.
The inspiration for the research didn’t come from an overload of comic books as one might suspect, but from the unassuming gecko. Geckos have footpads which allow them to crawl up vertical surfaces made of a huge array of materials and even across ceilings. They do this without a sticky adhesive but instead rely on tiny hairs covering the foot surface to help them stick. The feet are covered will millions and millions of these tiny hairs that split at the end, with the ends developing into mushroom shapes. The end of each split hair is less than one thousandth of a millimetre across. Due to the tiny size of the hairs, the geckos foot is very close to the surface it is trying to crawl across and this means that the molecular forces of attraction as dictated by Van der Waals principles take effect, and the Gecko will stick. The gecko releases itself simply by peeling its foot off the surface, breaking the molecular attraction.
BAE scientists imitated this interaction by putting down layers of thousands of polyimide stalks with splayed tips mimicking those found on geckos. They were successful and now steps are being taken to research the effect of surface texture and moisture on the adhesive’s effectiveness.
This adhesive possibly has endless use. BAE could use the product for things such as repair patches on their aircraft and machines, new building materials, super grip materials, and for rapid attachment of armour panels. But besides military applications the possibilities are endless.
Construction workers and window washers could have suits to help them climb up buildings, Emergency shelters could be put up rapidly, houses could be shored up before hurricanes, IKEA could use it on their flat pack furniture instead of nails and screws, it could be used to set bones and maybe, just maybe, it could stop my posters falling off the wall every night.
Alex Hay caught up with Drs Sajad Haq and Jeff Sargent who head up the investigations. Read the interview here.
And if you still want more, read about this and other inventions inspired by nature: check out our review of The Gecko’s Foot by Peter Forbes.
Image: Christopher Potter/SXC
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