Controllable load sharing for soft adhesive interfaces on three-dimensional surfaces
2017
Article
pi
For adhering to three-dimensional (3D) surfaces or objects, current adhesion systems are limited by a fundamental trade-off between 3D surface conformability and high adhesion strength. This limitation arises from the need for a soft, mechanically compliant interface, which enables conformability to nonflat and irregularly shaped surfaces but significantly reduces the interfacial fracture strength. In this work, we overcome this trade-off with an adhesion-based soft-gripping system that exhibits enhanced fracture strength without sacrificing conformability to nonplanar 3D surfaces. Composed of a gecko-inspired elastomeric microfibrillar adhesive membrane supported by a pressure-controlled deformable gripper body, the proposed soft-gripping system controls the bonding strength by changing its internal pressure and exploiting the mechanics of interfacial equal load sharing. The soft adhesion system can use up to ∼26% of the maximum adhesion of the fibrillar membrane, which is 14× higher than the adhering membrane without load sharing. Our proposed load-sharing method suggests a paradigm for soft adhesion-based gripping and transfer-printing systems that achieves area scaling similar to that of a natural gecko footpad.
Author(s): | Song, Sukho and Drotlef, Dirk-Michael and Majidi, Carmel and Sitti, Metin |
Journal: | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences |
Volume: | 114 |
Number (issue): | 22 |
Pages: | E4344–E4353 |
Year: | 2017 |
Department(s): | Physische Intelligenz |
Research Project(s): |
Fibrillar adhesives- and suction-based robotic soft grippers
|
Bibtex Type: | Article (article) |
DOI: | 10.1073/pnas.1620344114 |
BibTex @article{song2017controllable, title = {Controllable load sharing for soft adhesive interfaces on three-dimensional surfaces}, author = {Song, Sukho and Drotlef, Dirk-Michael and Majidi, Carmel and Sitti, Metin}, journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences}, volume = {114}, number = {22}, pages = {E4344–E4353}, year = {2017}, doi = {10.1073/pnas.1620344114} } |