Multiscale Soft Surface Instabilities for Adhesion Enhancement

Multiscale Soft Surface Instabilities for Adhesion Enhancement

Mohanan, Vaisakh Vilavinalthundil (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Mak, H.Y.L. (TU Delft Civil Engineering & Geosciences; The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Gurung, Nishan (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)
Xu, Qin (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology)

Civil Engineering & Geosciences

2022

Soft polymeric gels are susceptible to buckling-induced instabilities due to their great compliance to surface deformations. The instability patterns at soft interfaces have great potential in engineering functional materials with unique surface properties. In this work, we systematically investigated how swelling-induced instability patterns effectively improved the adhesive properties of soft polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) gels. We directly imaged the formations of the surface instability features during the relaxation process of a swollen gel substrate. The features were found to greatly increase the adhesion energy of soft gels across multiple length scales, and the adhesion enhancement was associated with the variations of contact lines both inside the contact region and along the contact periphery. We expect that these studies of instability patterns due to swelling will further benefit the design of functional interfaces in various engineering applications.

Adhesion
Instabilities
Soft gels
Swelling

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:059423a5-2d5c-4d4a-8397-a86cdcb85222

https://doi.org/10.3390/ma15030852

1996-1944

Materials, 15 (3)

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 Vaisakh Vilavinalthundil Mohanan, H.Y.L. Mak, Nishan Gurung, Qin Xu