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A low-cost, high-yield fabrication method for producing optimized biomimetic dry adhesives

D Sameoto and C Menon

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We present a low-cost, large-scale method of fabricating biomimetic dry adhesives. This process is useful because it uses all photosensitive polymers with minimum fabrication costs or complexity to produce molds for silicone-based dry adhesives. A thick-film lift-off process is used to define molds using AZ 9260 photoresist, with a slow acting, deep UV sensitive material, PMGI, used as both an adhesion promoter for the AZ 9260 photoresist and as an undercutting material to produce mushroom-shaped fibers. The benefits to this process are ease of fabrication, wide range of potential layer thicknesses, no special surface treatment requirements to demold silicone adhesives and easy stripping of the full mold if process failure does occur. Sylgard® 184 silicone is used to cast full sheets of biomimetic dry adhesives off 4" diameter wafers, and different fiber geometries are tested for normal adhesion properties. Additionally, failure modes of the adhesive during fabrication are noted and strategies for avoiding these failures are discussed. We use this fabrication method to produce different fiber geometries with varying cap diameters and test them for normal adhesion strengths. The results indicate that the cap diameters relative to post diameters for mushroom-shaped fibers dominate the adhesion properties.


PACS

82.35.Gh Polymers on surfaces; adhesion

68.35.Np Adhesion

Subjects

Soft matter, liquids and polymers

Surfaces, interfaces and thin films

Chemical physics and physical chemistry

Dates

Issue 11 (November 2009)

Received 16 December 2008, in final form 21 July 2009

Published 29 September 2009



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