Zhendong Dai

Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China

Title: Bioinspired Adhesive Materials and Micro-structures for Extremely Harsh Environments

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Biography

Dr. Zhendong Dai, professor, director and founder of the Institute of Bio-inspired Structure and Surface Engineering (IBSS) at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), Fellow of International Society of Bionic Engineering. His contribution including: 1) developed 3D force sensors and set up a facility to measure the 3D reaction force and to observe the motion behaviors simultaneously, discovered the reaction force pattern when gecko moving on floor, wall, ceiling and even various inclined surfaces, which greatly inspired the design of gecko-mimicking robots, and set up a company to develop and sell the 6 D force sensors; 2) investigated the adhesive mechanism and the detaching technique used by gecko; 3) fabricated the adhesive structures mimicking setae by self-growing carbon nanotube array technology, and modelling technology; 4) patented gecko mimicking adhesive devices and the robots for the applications in space and vacuum.

Abstract

Many animals, such as beetles, flies and geckos, have evolved abilities to adhere on vertical or inverted substrates by frictional interlock, wet adhesion based capillary force and dry adhesion based van der Waals force, thus can move in the ubiquitous three-dimensional space. Adhesive materials and micro-structures inspired by adhesive organs of the animals have great potential for various applications, such as wall-climbing robots(1), wound adhesive (2-4), wearable electronics(5,6), debris cleaning on space orbits(7) and  routine inspection for manned space station. However there are few reports which studied the performance of polymeric adhesive micro-structures under so harsh environments.

Here we report a new approach to fabricate the adhesive structure, which possess the adhesive strength 25.47 N/cm2 at -100 ?, and at the same time excellent adhesive durability under thermal cycling, from -100 to +100 ? per 90 minutes. It, for the first time, performed excellent reversible attachment and detachment on ice substrate at -98.5 ?. 

To meet the requirement of space applications, we have studied the various performance of the adhesive, including normal adhesive force at room temperature and -100?, adhesive durability under thermal cycling, adhesion on ice substrate, and radiation resistance. Results show that our products are better than the literature reported. 

The studies show that bio-inspired adhesive can be beyond limits of the creature, we believe that the adhesive structure would meet wide applications range in space exploration, glacier rescue and in daily life.