Critical roughness in animal hairy adhesive pads: a numerical modeling approach

General understanding of adhesion failure of setal attachment pads at some particular substrate
roughness is important for construction of biologically active adhesive and anti-adhesive surfaces.
Here we present a numerical model which is capable of explaining experimentally found effects of the
adhesion drop on the level of an individual adhesive spatula. The model incorporates the interaction
of an elastic spatula with a rough substrate in 2D. The contact area and the work of adhesion have
been determined for two different types of the model substrates. The surfaces were either composed
of particles of different sizes or obtained from real rough substrate by smothering with Gaussians
having varying widths. Surface profiles of real substrates with different roughness measured using
white light interferometry were utilized as a reference. The interaction of a spatula with a
substrate was found to be independent of the substrate model type. Similar to that observed in
expe...

Source: Bioinspiration and Biomimetics - September 20, 2018 Category: Science Authors: Alexander Kovalev, Alexander E Filippov and Stanislav N Gorb Source Type: research