Everyone can walk along the walls

The opportunity to compete with the lizard of Haecon and walking the walls and the ceiling becomes more real. Scientists in California thought about how to create a material covered with synthetic bristles, which has the properties of such hecting. If engineers manage to create a material that will imitate the incredible abilities of a small lizard, the number of ways to use it will be endless, today New Scientist reports (translation on the website inopressa.ru ).

For example, we could make non -slip shoes for athletes or tires, which in any weather provide the best adhesion to the road. In Hollywood, actors playing superheroes like Spider-Man or Neu from the "Matrix" could climb the walls and walk on the ceiling without forcing the studio to resort to computer graphics services.

The bristles on the paws of the geckons allows them to stay on almost any surface, smooth and rough, wet and dry. The ends of the bristles are so sticky that the geckones can hang on the ceiling, holding on only one finger.

But, notes the magazine, last year the question of why the bristles are so adhesive, caused many disputes. Some believed that chemical reactions occur on its surface. But then Ron Fearing and his colleagues from the University of California showed that the cause of stickiness is the forces of intermolecular interaction, which are called by van der Vaalsa.

Microscopic bulges

The fearing group showed that two microscopic polymeric bulges of about the same size as in the stubble, allow you to stick as tightly as the bristles of the geckons. Although separately the power of each bristle is small, in combination they give lizards an amazing ability to stay on any surface.

An engineer named Metin Sitty from the University of Carnegie Melllon in Pittsburgh, which is part of Fearing, has now created several samples of a polymeric basis. So far, they are not strong enough to keep an adult on the ceiling, but scientists are gradually approaching this. According to Sitty, at present, with the help of bristles, they can hold a weight of five kilograms on the ceiling, but they are constantly improving synthetic bristles.

To reproduce the bristles of the geckons, Sitty says, it is necessary to understand the importance of the shape and orientation of hairs. It is not enough to cover the flat surface with many bulges: so that the necessary force of attraction arises, they must interact with tiny bulges on the surface. In the root, the diameter of the bristles is the tenth of the micron. But at the end of the bristles, it is divided into many even thinner hairs, the diameter of each of which is hundredths of microns, they end with flat spatulas. Spatulas can bend and adapt to the surface of the wall at the molecular level, maximizing the effect of the forces of van der vials

Wax form

Now Sitty is improving the methods of simulating bristles. For example, he made bristles using a high resolution of an electron microscope. They were pressed into a wax form, which was then filled with a liquid polymer. This made it possible to create bristles of the desired size. Each of them has the same clutch force as the geckone bristles, and the overall effect depends on how many of them the contact will be made and what their density will be per unit area. But, according to him, the distance between the bristles cannot be reduced endlessly. "If you put them too close, they will cling to each other."

Sitty plans for the future - the creation of climbing robots for space research. He imagines the researchers of other planets that can get on any unknown surface, regardless of the conditions, or robots that can bypass the spaceship outside, checking if there are damage such as the loss of protective tiles of the thermal shield or holes in the wing.