Towards Future Interfaces With Tuneable Adhesion By Dynamic Excitation

Introduction

Macroscopic adhesion is of utmost importance in key technologies such as soft and climbing robots, aerospace grasping technologies, human-robot interactions, and pick-and-place manipulators. Commonly, bioinspired adhesive interfaces have been characterized from a quasi-static perspective, neglecting the effect of dynamic excitations.

Dynamic Enhancements

Nevertheless, recent observations suggest that added micro-vibrations may be exploited to strongly enhance and rapidly tune macroscopic adhesion. By exploiting the multiplicative coupling between geometric- and viscoelastic vibration-induced enhancements of macroscopic adhesion, SURFACE aims at designing future soft interfaces with unprecedented and tunable adhesion strength.

Objectives

To this end, I aim to:

1. Develop highly efficient numerical tools for studying adhesion of patterned soft surfaces under micro-vibration excitation.
2. Unveil the coupling effect between topography and viscoelasticity that determines the interfacial strength and toughness.
3. Design optimal surface topography and excitation for macroscopic adhesion tuning, by exploiting artificial intelligence models to unveil new mechanisms for adhesion enhancement.
4. Prove the adhesive performance reached by experimentally testing high-resolution 3D printed interfaces with the desired topography and superposed micro-vibrations.

Challenges and Innovations

So far, the adhesive performance of bioinspired patterned interfaces has been limited by manufacturing capabilities at the micro/nanoscale. SURFACE's groundbreaking approach aims at exploiting dynamic excitation to outperform state-of-the-art adhesive interfaces.

Future Potential

By exploiting artificial intelligence models, SURFACE aims at revealing new mechanisms for adhesion enhancement, which lay beyond our intuition. Rapidly tunable strong adhesive interfaces have the potential to revolutionize cutting-edge technologies based on soft adhesive interfaces that require moving and placing objects quickly and with accuracy.