Ultra-Strong Biomimetic Adhesive Could Allow Human Wall-Walking, Ceiling-Dancing

By Clay Dillow Posted 02.02.2010 at 12:24 pm 13 Comments

Leaping tall buildings, punching through solid concrete walls and using public phone booths as ersatz changing rooms without anyone noticing are still beyond human capacity, but a development at Cornell University might allow us to walk on walls like Spider Man, or even dance on the ceiling like Lionel Richie.

Cornell's Surface Tension Adhesion Device: Today's Lego Man payload could spell tomorrow's wall-walking human. Michael Vogel

Employing the same surface tension that makes two wet, flat surfaces stick forcefully together (think microscope slides), researchers at Cornell developed a palm-sized device consisting of a flat plate full of extremely tiny holes (on the micron scale) and separated from a liquid reservoir by a porous middle layer. Current form a 9-volt battery pumps water through the device, pushing tiny droplets through the top layer, creating many tiny points of surface tension that can grip another surface. Reversing the current causes the droplets to retract and the grip to cease, so the user can grip and release instantly and at will.

The individual bonds are weak relatively speaking, but enough of them together coupled with the ability to turn them on and off rapidly mean it could lead to such far-fetched applications as gloves or shoes that stick and un-stick to walls, or items like Post-it notes that are load-bearing (because we’ve all been waiting for a Post-it that can also patch a leaky radiator hose).

Inspiration for the device came from a beetle that uses a similar mechanism to adhere to surfaces with forces up to 100 times its own body weight. While biomimicry has produced its fair share of synthetic adhesives, including bonding agents for reconnecting the body's tissues, the potential strength of this new device is novel. Researchers have found that the smaller and more numerous the holes on the top plate, the stronger the devices become. They estimate a one-square-inch device with millions of 1-micron (one-millionth of a meter) holes could conceivably take on a 15-pound load.

If that math holds true then the surface area on the sole of a single adhesive shoe could – in theory of course – support the weight of a human being as he or she traversed a ceiling. Oh, what a feeling.

[Eurekalert]

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13 Comments

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caradoc01

02/02/10 at 1:34 pm

Cool, but was the video really needed?

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animemaster

02/02/10 at 1:47 pm

Yes, yes it was.

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Rusty_Battleaxe

02/02/10 at 2:39 pm

well said, video completely neccessary

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Thumper_DS

02/02/10 at 3:18 pm

yeah you stick this flubber to your shoes and its all good until your shoes slip off and you fall to your death.

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rpenri

02/02/10 at 6:12 pm

Thumber_DS

Well, only an idiot decides to use these shoes to walk a ceiling high enough to fall down and die without checking his shoe laces first, right? If that's the case, good riddance. The world needs less of them anyways.

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old-scratch

02/03/10 at 4:17 am

OMFG yes please I so want to climb around on the ceiling like someone possessed in a exorcist movie and scare the shit out of old people.

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jedrik101

02/03/10 at 5:13 am

To old-scratch

LOL to that :))

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StephenD.Alverez

02/03/10 at 5:50 am

Christopher Walken dancing on ceilings, my dream a reality!

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Q42

02/03/10 at 10:08 am

Very, very nice. All the cool pranking aside, I can see this tech becoming a boon to rock climbers, rescue teams, power line repairmen and a host of others. Hard-to-reach places (or even dangerous-to-reach ones) are going to get a whole lot more accessible.

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Scott_M

02/03/10 at 11:11 am

Football gloves.

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rpenri

02/03/10 at 11:36 am

Scott_M

The league's office of competition would ban it the second a player decided to put one on. They made spraying your gloves with spray-on adhesives illegal a long time ago. I don't see why they wouldn't with these.

Of course, if you're not in the NFL, and are prone to a case of the "butter fingers", then go and get some and be happy.

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Xenodorx

02/05/10 at 6:21 pm

This might be what DARPA's Z-Man project is looking for.

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Dirk Mcbratney

02/09/10 at 9:03 pm

I don't see it for any real "climbing" applications without designing around it. I mean, real walls aren't designed for it - cliffs aren't smooth and architecture isn't built to cope.

In the far-flung future of maintenance robots, though, this will be damned convenient. I'm seeing window washing and hull checks on seagoing vessels, for instance. Or in manufacturing, I suppose, where robots' selectively sticky fingers could be a boon to assembly by removing the limitations implied by parts designed to be handled.