Nature Communications publishes Liu Ze and Shui Langquan team’s research findings on Adhesion Regulation Technique
Recently, Nature Communications published the latest research findings on artificial adhesion regulation by Liu Ze and Shui Langquan’s team from the School of Civil Engineering, Wuhan University. This research represents a simple and practical way to design and control surface adhesion in relevant applications.
The paper is entitled Rapid and continuous regulating adhesion strength by mechanical micro-vibration. The School of Civil Engineering, Wuhan University is the first author affiliation with Shui Langquan and Liu Ze from the Department of Engineering Mechanics named as first author and corresponding author respectively.
Controlled tuning of interface adhesion is known to be crucial to a broad range of applications, such as space technology, micro-fabrication, flexible electronics, robotics, and bio-integrated devices. This research led to the discovery that by exciting the mechanical micro-vibration in a typical adhesion system and utilizing the adhesion hysteresis and dynamic instability, the apparent adhesion strength can be enhanced by 77 times or weakened to 0 and can be maintained at any desired value with good durability and reversibility within the theoretically permissible regulation ranges. Under high-intensive working conditions, single rapid adhesion switching can be repeated for more than 2×107vibration cycles without any noticeable degradation in the adhesion performance. Besides, within the range of controlled adhesion strength, the adhesion switching can be very quick, on the order of 101ms.
This research is thoroughly independent of surface/interface microstructures and high-performance adhesion materials that traditional manual adhesion techniques rely on, and represents a simple, economical, and practical solution to the artificial adhesion requirements of relevant applications. At the same time, the theoretical model proposed in this research is a model that can be successfully applied to the study of adhesion contact dynamics since JKR static theory was proposed in 1971.
Article Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15447-x
doi: 10.1038/s41467-020-15447-x
Written by: Hu Zhenzhen
Rewritten by: Chen Muying
Edited by: Wu Buer, Shen Yuxi and Hu Sijia
