Stronger tape engineered through the art of cutting
Associate Professor Michael Bartlett pulls enhanced tape developed in his lab at Virginia Tech.
Photo by Alex Parrish for Virginia Tech
Michael Bartlett’s team at Virginia Tech has adapted kirigami, the ancient Japanese art of cutting paper, into a method for increasing the adhesive bond of ordinary tape by 60 times.
Adhesive tape fulfills many purposes, from quickly fixing household appliances to ensuring a reliable seal on a mailed package. When using tape with a strong bond, removing it may only be possible by scraping and prying at the tape’s corners, hoping desperately that surface pieces don’t tear away with the tape.
But what if you could make adhesives both strong and easily removable? This seemingly paradoxical combination of properties could dramatically change applications in robotic grasping, wearables for health monitoring, and manufacturing for assembly and recycling.
Developing such adhesives may not by that far off through the latest research conducted by the team of Michael Bartlett, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech, and published in Nature Materials on June 22.
The physics of stickiness
Adhesive tapes were first developed in the 1920s to meet a need for automobile painters who wanted better options for painting two colors on car bodies. Since the first masking tape was put into use, many other variations have been created. Factories have rolled out invisible tape for wrapping presents, electrical tape for covering wires, and duct tape for more uses than it was ever intended to fill.
Normally, when tapes are peeled off, they separate in a straight line along the length of the strip until the tape is completely removed. Strong adhesives are made more difficult to peel, while reusable adhesives promote the strength-limiting separation.
Bartlett’s team theorized that if the separation path were controlled, then perhaps adhesives could be made both strong and removable. They tapped into the methods of a 2,000-year-old Japanese art form to determine how to do it.
Journal: Nature Materials
DOI: 10.1038/s41563-023-01577-2
Media Contact
Margaret Ashburn
Virginia Tech
mkashburn@vt.edu
Cell: 540-529-0814
All latest news from the category: Materials Sciences
Materials management deals with the research, development, manufacturing and processing of raw and industrial materials. Key aspects here are biological and medical issues, which play an increasingly important role in this field.
innovations-report offers in-depth articles related to the development and application of materials and the structure and properties of new materials.
Newest articles
Pinpointing hydrogen isotopes in titanium hydride nanofilms
Although it is the smallest and lightest atom, hydrogen can have a big impact by infiltrating other materials and affecting their properties, such as superconductivity and metal-insulator-transitions. Now, researchers from…
A new way of entangling light and sound
For a wide variety of emerging quantum technologies, such as secure quantum communications and quantum computing, quantum entanglement is a prerequisite. Scientists at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Science of Light…
Telescope for NASA’s Roman Mission complete, delivered to Goddard
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is one giant step closer to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. The mission has now received its final major delivery: the Optical Telescope…