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posted by takyon on Saturday August 15 2015, @07:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the make-it-stick dept.

From NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

A piece of tape can only be used a few times before the adhesion wears off and it can no longer hold two surfaces together. But researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, are working on the ultimate system of stickiness, inspired by geckos. Thanks to tiny hairs on the bottom of geckos' feet, these lizards can cling to walls with ease, and their stickiness doesn't wear off with repeated usage. JPL engineer Aaron Parness and colleagues used that concept to create a material with synthetic hairs that are much thinner than a human hair. When a force is applied to make the tiny hairs bend, that makes the material stick to a desired surface.

"This is how the gecko does it, by weighting its feet," Parness said. Behind this phenomenon is a concept called van der Waals forces. A slight electrical field is created because electrons orbiting the nuclei of atoms are not evenly spaced, so there are positive and negative sides to a neutral molecule. The positively charged part of a molecule attracts the negatively charged part of its neighbor, resulting in "stickiness." Even in extreme temperature, pressure and radiation conditions, these forces persist.

"The grippers don't leave any residue and don't require a mating surface on the wall the way Velcro would," Parness said. The newest generation of grippers can support more than 150 Newtons of force, the equivalent of 35 pounds (16 kilograms).

Previously: Gecko Grippers get a Microgravity Test Flight


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:13PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:13PM (#223270)

    Don't copy/paste into a blockquote and change the quote. The original article:

    The newest generation of grippers can support more than 150 Newtons of force, the equivalent of 35 pounds (16 kilograms).

    Keep the original quote, and if you feel the need to have to elucidate, do it outside the quote.

    And what's with the 15.3 kilograms @ 1G all about? The original article converted it to metric. In fact, it used metric as the primary number presented. It even used the proper units! You mean all you "You have to convert your units to metric because I am too dense to scale them myself, and if you give me a length in feet I have absolutely NO idea how big that is without looking down." whiners can only relate weight in kilograms!!! Good God man, you mean you noisily insist everything should be converted to Centigrade and meters, but you can only relate weight to mass units!

    Wankers.