Enhanced Adhesion by Gecko-Inspired Hierarchical Fibrillar Adhesives

The complex structures that allow geckos to repeatably adhere to surfaces consist of multilevel branching fibers with specialized tips. We present a novel,technique For fabricating similar multilevel structures from polymer materials and demonstrate the fabrication of arrays of two and three-level structures, wherein each level terminates in flat mushroom-type tips. Adhesion experiments are conducted on two-level Fiber arrays on a 12-mm-diameter glass hemisphere, which exhibit both increased adhesion and interface toughness over one-level fiber samples and unstructured control samples. These adhesion enhancements are the result of increased surface-conformation as well as increased extension during detachment.