Carbon nanotube-based synthetic gecko tapes.

Synthetic gecko foot-hairs from multiwalled carbon nanotubes.

We report a fabrication process for constructing polymer surfaces with multiwalled carbon nanotube hairs, with strong nanometer-level adhesion forces that are 200 times higher than those observed for gecko foot-hairs.

Solid state and materials research news: phys. stat. sol. (RRL) 4/2007

Mimicking the agile gecko, with its uncanny ability to run up walls and across ceilings, has long been a goal of materials scientists. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Akron have taken one sticky step in the right direction, creating synthetic “gecko tape” with four times the sticking power of the real thing. The researchers describe a process for making pol...

Gecko Foot Mimetic Carbon Nanotube Patterned Adhesive Surfaces

Friction and adhesion of hierarchical carbon nanotube structures for biomimetic dry adhesives: multiscale modeling.

With unique hierarchical fibrillar structures on their feet, gecko lizards can walk on vertical walls or even ceilings. Recent experiments have shown that strong binding along the shear direction and easy lifting in the normal direction can be achieved by forming unidirectional carbon nanotube array with laterally distributed tips similar to gecko's feet. In this study, a multiscale modeling ap...

Staying sticky: contact self-cleaning of gecko-inspired adhesives.

The exceptionally adhesive foot of the gecko remains clean in dirty environments by shedding contaminants with each step. Synthetic gecko-inspired adhesives have achieved similar attachment strengths to the gecko on smooth surfaces, but the process of contact self-cleaning has yet to be effectively demonstrated. Here, we present the first gecko-inspired adhesive that has matched both the attach...