By Jessica Barber

           On Wednesday, September 16, the Office of Undergraduate Education (OUE) hosted the kick-off session for the 13th Annual InVenture Prize. With over $35,000 in prizes, the competition is the holy grail of college entrepreneurship. Although the InVenture Prize officially starts in January 2021, students have already begun their preparations and idea declarations.

Unlike previous years, the kick-off was hosted online through Gatherly, a virtual event platform recently built by none other than Georgia Tech students. Despite this, attendees did not miss a beat. The kick-off marked a return to normalcy for the Georgia Tech innovation community from learning key information about the competition to directly speaking with past winners.

           After a welcome from interim Assistant Director of Student Innovation, Recha Reid, students were given an overview of some upcoming InVenture Prize events, including the ongoing Pitch Your Idea and IdeaBuzz sessions. Students were given an overview of OUE’s customer discovery, financial forecasting, marketing, and patent/copyright workshops. From there, the floor was turned over to Dr. Chris Reaves, executive director of the office for Academic Enrichment Programs.

           “At its core, the InVenture Prize is an invention startup competition, but we work together — even the teams work with each other — to help one another. We achieve more, grow more, and develop our companies better when we’re helping each other, and that’s a big part of what we’re doing,” Reaves explained.

           Later, students were given the opportunity to speak with representatives from Queues and Aerodyme, the respective first- and second-place winners of the 2020 InVenture Prize. Students learned firsthand what it takes to succeed on the InVenture Prize stage; the teams later offered advice on the invention process, their lessons learned, and the visibility benefits of participating in the competition.

           “If you’re on the edge right now about doing InVenture Prize, definitely do it. We actually had that same thought before we did it, and we’re just so glad that we did. It’s a lot of work, and you’re going to step outside of your comfort zone, but it’s so worth it”, said Joy Bullington of team Aerodyme Technologies. 

           Queues team member Sam Porta similarly had some words of encouragement for those looking into the 2021 InVenture Prize. 

           “The difference between an entrepreneur and someone who’s just engineering something is persistence, and the InVenture Prize is a great opportunity to test this. If you think you’ve come up with something great that has a lot of value, then, by all means, do it,” Porta emphasized.

           Towards the end of the session, students were invited to visit virtual “booths” dedicated to areas of health, retail, fintech, transportation, education tools, gaming, and networking.

           “InVenture is honestly one of the reasons I chose to come to Tech, and I’m just so excited to come into with something that I’m really confident about,” an attendee said.

           “The most interesting thing about tonight was hearing from the past winners and having them talk about their experiences. Definitely super excited to apply, and hopefully we do really well,” another stated.

           Registration for the 2021 InVenture Prize will remain open until January. Student innovators are invited to check out OUE’s information and development sessions to be held throughout the Fall semester. All dates and related topics can be found at innovation.gatech.edu and inventureprize.gatech.edu.

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE 2021 INVENTURE PRIZE BY CLICKING HERE

Visit us on

Facebook

Instagram @gtinventure

Twitter @InVenturePrize

Imagine a reusable face mask that protects wearers and those around them from SARS-CoV-2, is comfortable enough to wear all day, and stays in place without frequent adjustment. Based on decades of experience with filtration and textile materials, Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have designed a new mask intended to do just that — and are providing the plans so individuals and manufacturers can make it.

The modular Georgia Tech mask combines a barrier filtration material with a stretchable fabric to hold it in place. Prototypes made for testing use hook and eye fasteners on the back of the head to keep the masks on, and include a pocket for an optional filter to increase protection. After 20 washings, the prototypes have not shrunk or lost their shape.

“If we want to reopen the economy and ask people to go back to work, we need a mask that is both comfortable and effective,” said Sundaresan Jayaraman, the Kolon Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. “We have taken a science-based approach to designing a better mask, and we are very passionate about getting this out so people can use it to help protect themselves and others from harm.”

The fundamental flaw in existing reusable cloth masks is that they — unlike N95 respirators, which are fitted for individual users — leak air around the edges, bypassing their filtration mechanism. That potentially allows virus particles, both large droplets and smaller aerosols, to enter the air breathed in by users, and allows particles from infected persons to exit the mask. 

The leakage problem shows up in complaints about eyeglasses fogging up as exhaled breath leaks around the nose, making people less likely to wear them. The fit problem can also be seen in constant adjustments made by wearers, who could potentially contaminate themselves whenever they touch the masks after touching other surfaces.

To address the leakage challenge, Jayaraman and principal research scientist Sungmee Park created a two-part mask that fastens behind the head like many N95 respirators. The front part — the barrier component — contains the filtration material and is contoured to fit tightly while allowing space ahead of the nose and mouth to avoid breathing restrictions and permit unrestricted speech. Made from the kind of moisture-wicking material used in athletic clothing, it includes a pocket into which a filter can be inserted to increase the filtration efficiency and thereby increase protection. The washable fabric filter is made of a blend of Spandex and polyester. 

The second part of the mask is fashioned from stretchable material. The stretchable part, which has holes for the ears to help position the mask, holds the front portion in place and fastens with conventional hook and eyelet hardware, a mechanism that has been used in clothing for centuries.

“We want people to be able to get the mask in the right place every time,” Jayaraman said. “If you don’t position it correctly and easily, you are going to have to keep fiddling with it. We see that all the time on television with people adjusting their masks and letting them drop below their noses.”

Beyond controlling air leakage, designing a better mask involves a tradeoff between filtration effectiveness and how well users can breathe. If a mask makes breathing too difficult, users will simply not use it, reducing compliance with masking requirements.

Many existing mask designs attempt to increase filtration effectiveness by boosting the number of layers, but that may not be as helpful as it might seem, Park said. “We tested 16 layers of handkerchief material, and as we increased the layers, we measured increased breathing resistance,” she said. “While the breathing resistance went up, the filtration did not improve as much as we would have expected.”

“Good filtration efficiency is not enough by itself,” said Jayaraman. “The combination of fit, filtration efficiency, and staying in the right place make for a good mask.”

The stretchable part of the mask is made from knitted fabric — a Spandex/Lyocell blend — to allow for stretching around the head and under the chin. The researchers used a woven elastic band sewn with pleats to cover the top of the nose. 

The researchers made their mask prototypes from synthetic materials instead of cotton. Though cotton is a natural material, it absorbs moisture and holds it on the face, reducing breathability, and potentially creating a “petri dish” for the growth of microbes. 

“Masks have become an essential accessory in our wardrobe and add a social dimension to how we feel about wearing them,” Park said. So, the materials chosen for the mask come in a variety of colors and designs. “Integrating form and function is key to having a mask that protects individuals while making them look good and feel less self-conscious,” Jayaraman said. 

The work of Jayaraman and Park didn’t begin with the Covid-19 pandemic. They received funding 10 years ago from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study face masks during the avian influenza outbreak. Since then Jayaraman has been part of several National Academy of Medicine initiatives to develop recommendations for improved respiratory protection.

Covid-19 dramatically increased the importance of using face masks because of the role played by asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic exposure from persons who don’t know they are infected, Jayaraman said. While the proportion of aerosol contributions to transmission is still under study, they likely increase the importance of formfitting masks that don’t leak.

Jayaraman and Park have published their recommendations in The Journal of The Textile Institute, and will make the specifications and patterns for their mask available to individuals and manufacturers. The necessary materials can be obtained from retail fabric stores, and the instructions describe how to measure for customizing the masks. 

“There is so much misinformation about what face masks can do and cannot do,” Jayaraman said. “Being scientists and engineers, we want to put out information backed by science that can help our community reduce the harm from SARS-CoV-2.”

Link to plans, patterns and specifications for this mask

CITATION: Sungmee Park and Sundaresan Jayaraman, “From containment to harm reduction from SARS-CoV-2: a fabric mask for enhanced effectiveness, comfort, and compliance.” (The Journal of The Textile Institute, 2020) https://doi.org/10.1080/00405000.2020.1805971 

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

The simplicity and elegance of origami, an ancient Japanese art form, has motivated researchers to explore its application in the world of materials. 

New research from an interdisciplinary team, including Northwestern University’s Horacio Espinosa and Sridhar Krishnaswamy and the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Glaucio Paulino, aims to advance the creation and understanding of such folded structures for applications ranging from soft robotics to medical devices to energy harvesters.

Inspired by origami, mechanical metamaterials — artificial structures with mechanical properties defined by their structure rather than their composition — have gained considerable attention because of their potential to yield deployable and highly tunable structures and materials. 

What wasn’t known was which structures integrate shape recoverability, pronounced directional mechanical properties, and reversible auxeticity — meaning their lateral dimensions can increase and then decrease when progressively squeezed. Though some 3D origami structures have been produced through additive manufacturing, achieving the folding properties displayed in ideal paper origami remained a challenge. 

Using nanoscale effects for an origami design, the team of researchers from Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Georgia Tech's School of Civil and Environmental Engineering sought to answer that question. They produced small, 3D, origami-built metamaterials, successfully retaining the best properties without resorting to artifacts to enable folding. 

“The created structures constitute the smallest fabricated origami architected metamaterials exhibiting an unprecedented combination of mechanical properties,” said Espinosa, the James and Nancy J. Farley Professor of Manufacturing and Entrepreneurship and professor of mechanical engineering and (by courtesy) biomedical engineering and civil and environmental engineering. 

“Our work demonstrated that rational design of metamaterials, with a large degree of shape recoverability and direction-dependent stiffness and deformation, is possible using origami designs, and that origami foldability enables a state where the material initially expands and subsequently contracts laterally (reversible auxeticity),” added Espinosa, who serves as director of Northwestern’s theoretical and applied mechanics graduate program. “Such properties promise to influence a number of applications across a wide range of fields encompassing the nano-, micro-, and macro-scales, leveraging the intrinsic scalability of origami assemblies.”

“Guided by geometry, the scaling and miniaturization of the origami metamaterial are exciting in itself and by the unprecedented multifunctionality that it naturally enables,” said Paulino, the Raymond Allen Jones Chair in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“Only an interdisciplinary effort combining origami design, 3D laser printing with nanoscale resolution, and in situ electron microscopy mechanical testing could reveal the unprecedented combination of properties our work demonstrated and their potential impact on future applications,” added Paulino, who contributed to establishing the National Science Foundation Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation program named ODISSEI (Origami Design for Integration of Self-assembling Systems for Engineering Innovation).

“Just like nature has architected a wide range of structures using just a few material systems, origami allows us to engineer resilient structural components with distinct physical properties along different directions,” said Krishnaswamy, professor of mechanical engineering. 

“We can envision origami-based soft microrobots that are stiff along some directions to carry payloads while maintaining other degrees of flexibility for motion. Origami-metamaterials that exploit reversible auxeticity and large deformation can lead to multifunctional applications ranging from deployable microsurgical instruments and medical devices to energy steering and harvesting,” added Krishnaswamy, the director of Northwestern’s Center for Smart Structures and Materials.

The study presents new avenues to be explored long term, Espinosa said.

“There are a number of possibilities,” he said. “One is the fabrication of origami structures with ceramic and metallic materials, while preserving nanoscale dimensions, to exploit size effects in the mechanical response of the structures leading to superior energy dissipation per unit volume and mass. Another is the use of piezoelectric polymers, which can result in energy harvesters that can drive sensing modalities or power microsurgical tools.”

The research, “Folding at the Microscale: Enabling Multifunctional 3D Origami-Architected Metamaterials” was published in the journal Small on July 27. Along with Espinosa, Krishnaswamy, and Paulino, coauthors include Northwestern’s Nicolas A. Alderete, Zhaowen Lin, and Heming Wei, and Larissa S. Novelino from Georgia Tech.

The research was supported by the Army Research Office (award W911NF1220022), a Multi-University Research Initiative through the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR-FA9550-15-1-0009), the Office of Naval Research (grants N00014-15-1-2935 and N00014-16-1-3021), and the National Science Foundation (grant No. 1538830). Nicolas Alderete received a fellowship from the Argentinian Roberto Rocca Education Program and Larisa Novelino from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (project 235104/2014-0).

Writer: Brian Sandalow, Northwestern University

Dr. Christine Ries has been invited to serve on a Review Panel for the New NSF Future Manufacturing Program on Eco-Manufacturing. 

This new multidisciplinary NSF program supports fundamental research and education of a future workforce that would enable the types of manufacturing that are not existent yet or are at such early stages of development they are not yet viable (Future Manufacturing). Reviews considered impacts on the economy, workforce, human behavior, and society at large.

Click here to read this week's update on innovation at Georgia Tech. This latest edition highlights opportunities to view what other student entrepreneurs are undertaking across campus, speak with student startups on how they were able to create a startup, and find out more about hackathons. Explore opportunities to celebrate the US's Independence Day virtually!

So many people Seth Marder spoke to didn’t see the hand sanitizer crisis brewing. The country was going to run dangerously short if someone did not act urgently.

The professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology rallied colleagues and partners around the cause in March, and by early June, they had replaced a key component of hand sanitizer, created a new supply chain, and initiated their own donation of 7,000 gallons of a newly designed sanitizer to medical facilities.

Its name: Han-I-Size White & Gold, named for the colors of Georgia Tech. The new supply chain also may ensure that hand sanitizer producers across the country do not run out of the main active ingredient, alcohol, but the team’s path to success was a stony labyrinth.

“This project was on life support so many times because people did not understand how severe this shortage was going to be,” said Marder, a Regents Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “I called hospitals and institutions to assess the need and heard the same thing over and over: ‘No, we just got a delivery. We have no need. You’re wasting your time.’”

Marder was not. Contacts at major chemical suppliers of hand sanitizer ingredients said that a critical shortage of alcohol, particularly the one usually in hand sanitizer, isopropanol, was coming.

“Isopropanol plants in the U.S. were running at full capacity and still didn’t have enough. People were using pharmaceutical-grade ethanol now, too, but it was also in short supply. We weren’t going to have enough of either; I mean the whole United States was running low,” Marder said. 

Clean hands cabal

Marder hastily drafted Chris Luettgen, a professor of practice in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, George White, interim vice president of Georgia Tech’s Office of Industry Collaboration, and Atif Dabdoub, a Georgia Tech alumnus and owner of a local chemical company, Unichem Technologies, Inc.

To the three chemists and the business professional, it seemed simple: Mix alcohol with water, peroxide, and the moisturizer glycerin then bottle and ship it. That bubble burst quickly.

Luettgen, who had worked in the consumer products industry for 25 years at Kimberly-Clark Corporation and knew how to take products to market, had to plow through constant unexpected supply chain barriers and bureaucracy while White forged connections between companies. Neither the supply chain nor the business relationships had existed before, and the teams’ phones stayed glued to their ears night and day as they created them from scratch.

“When I worked for Kimberly-Clark, getting a new product out would take the company nine to 18 months, and the three of us had to get this done in weeks. The demand was there, and people were getting sick in some cases from lack of sanitizing. We felt speed was necessary to meet the growing demand. Seth told me to push this across the goal line, and I put everything into it,” Luettgen said.

“Georgia Tech is about the power to convene. Companies and stakeholders are eager to come to the table here to make things happen,” White said about forging new business ties. “Not everyone has that incredible recognition as a problem solver with the brainpower amassed here.”

Stinking of gin

Purchasing truckloads of alcohol was priority one.

Boutique liquor distilleries in Georgia were already converting to sanitizer ethyl alcohol production, but output was nowhere near enough to meet demand. ExxonMobil connected the team with Eco-Energy, a company that handles fuel-grade ethanol as a gasoline additive.

“The amount of ethanol that’s made for fuel in the U.S. is 1,500 times the amount of the isopropanol made. They could drain off about 1 percent of what is used for fuel and double or triple the amount of alcohol available for hand sanitizer in this country. And the fuel companies wouldn’t even notice it was gone, especially since hardly anyone was driving anymore,” Marder said.

But then prospective hand sanitizer distributors crimped their noses at that ethanol, saying it smelled odd.

“I thought, ‘This has the makings of a screenplay.’ I asked the distributor if we could come over to smell a sample for ourselves,” White said. “It needed a little love.”

Eco-Fuels produced the highly refined ethanol and then processed it through carbon filtration to increase purity and reduce odor. Atlanta-based chemical manufacturer, Momar, Inc., oversaw production, packaging, and distribution of Han-I-Size White & Gold.

The Georgia Tech team garnered funding through a donation from insurer Aflac Incorporated allocated through the Global Center for Medical Innovation (GCMI), a Georgia Tech affiliated non-profit organization that guides new experimental medical solutions to market. Aflac’s gift of $2 million through GCMI has also expedited the development, production, and purchase of other PPE to donate to health care workers.

In addition, GCMI helped guide the hand sanitizer through regulatory processes and to market. In a another development, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration was also aware of the dire shortage of alcohol for sanitizer and issued waivers for the pandemic to allow for use of ethanol in sanitizers without having to meet usual specifications.

Water, water everywhere 

Arkema, Inc. donated hydrogen peroxide, which was delivered to PSG Functional Materials, which mixed and packaged the product then shipped with no delivery fee to Atlanta. Though water is ubiquitous, hand sanitizer requires purified water, and the Coca-Cola Company donated a tanker truck of it just when White was pondering desperate measures.

“If I have to get a truck to go pick up water and drive it, I’ll do it myself,” he said.

Finally, the first few hundred gallons of donated Han-I-Size White & Gold rolled into Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta and Brightmoor Nursing Center in Griffin, Georgia, in the second week of June 2020.

GCMI is facilitating donations of the 7,000 gallons nationwide. Separate from the Aflac-financed donations, Momar will continue to manufacture the new hand sanitizing formula commercially to include in its regular product lineup, and Georgia Tech will be able to purchase it at a reduced rate to help protect researchers now returning to their labs.

The new supply chain, the first of its kind, of “waiver-grade” ethanol has given hand sanitizer producers across the country a new opportunity to re-supply America.

“Hopefully, we helped solved a national need,” Luettgen said.

Read about what else we are doing to help in the Covid-19 crisis.

Here's how to subscribe to our free science and technology email newsletter

Writer & media inquiries: Ben Brumfield, ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu or John Toon (404-894-6986), jtoon@gatech.edu.

Georgia Institute of Technology

IDEaS recently awarded a series of grants to stimulate the research efforts of Georgia Tech’s brightest minds in data science and related disciplines. Faculty and student research programs targeted for IDEaS awards must demonstrate research goals that will be highly cross-disciplinary and emphasize how data science can assist in related research areas.

The Data Science Research Scholarships program will support scholarships for the Spring 2020 semester and focus on Ph.D. student research that enables new collaborative research or adds a data science dimension to established research projects. Each scholarship will fund 50% of the cost of a GRA appointment, with the project PI funding the remaining 50%. 

Data Science Research Scholarships 2020 Awards

• JC Gumbart (Physics) & David Sherrill (Chemistry): Force-field Development to Enable Simulations of Xeno-nucleic Acids
• Xiuwei Zhang (CSE) & Haesun Park (CSE): Development of an Integrative Clustering Method for Single Cells
• Vince Calhoun (ECE) & Audrey Duarte (Psych): The Chronnectomics of Memory
• Annalisa Bracco (EAS), Jie He (EAS) & Matt J. Kusner (University College London): Machine-learning Techniques for Cloud Modeling
• Toyya Pujol-Mitchell (ISYE), Nicoleta Serban (ISyE) & Constantine Dovrolis (CS): Network Weight Prediction Using Node Attributes
• Xiaofan Liang (City & Reg Planning), Clio Andris (City & Reg Planning) & Diyi Yang (IC): Advancing Metrics for Spatial Social Networks in the Era of Big Data
• Omar Asensio (Public Policy): Do Micromobility Options Reduce Traffic Congestion? Quasi-experimental Evidence from Uber Movement Data
• Constantine Dovrolis (CS) & Kelly F. Ethun (Emory/Yerkes): Connections Between Social Behavior and Food Intake in Rhesus Macaques

• Diyi Yang (IC) & Mai ElSherief (IC): Defining, Characterizing, and Detecting Implicit Discriminatory Speech Online
• Umakishore Ramachandran (CS) & Zhuangdi Xu (CS): Generating Labeled Vehicle Tracking Dataset for Large-scale Geo-Distributed Camera Networks
• Surya R. Kalidindi (ME/CSE/MSE) & Christopher Saldana (ME): Advanced Materials-Manufacturing Data Curation
• Agata Rozga (IC), Thomas Ploetz (IC) & external: Annotation of Datasets from Severe Behavior Treatment Program at the Marcus Autism Center

• Diyi Yang (IC): Allen Institute for AI and University of Washington
• Josh Kacher (MSE): Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Rachel Cummings (ISyE): Georgetown University and U.S. Census Bureau

• Betsy DiSalvo (IC): Data Work Civic Engagement Panel
• Diyi Yang (IC): Natural Language Processing/Computational Social Science Seminar

Click here to read this week's update on innovation at Georgia Tech. This latest edition highlights opportunities to rapidly design your prototype, meet with other entrepreneurs, and reimagine your career. Explore opportunities to volunteer virtually!

What good shall I do this day?

Click here to read this week's update on innovation at Georgia Tech. This latest edition highlights upcoming summer classes, ways to use social media, and building your startup. Explore theme parks virtually!

Why did the gecko climb the skyscraper? Because it could; its toes stick to about anything. Engineers can already emulate the secrets of gecko stickiness to make strips of rubbery materials that can pick up and release objects, but simple mass production for everyday use has been out of reach until now.

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed, in a new study, a method of making gecko-inspired adhesive materials that is much more cost-effective than current methods. It could enable mass production and the spread of the versatile gripping strips to manufacturing and homes.

Polymers with “gecko adhesion” surfaces could be used to make extremely versatile grippers to pick up very different objects even on the same assembly line. They could make picture hanging easy by adhering to both the picture and the wall at the same time. Vacuum cleaner robots with gecko adhesion could someday scoot up tall buildings to clean facades.

“With the exception of things like Teflon, it will adhere to anything. This is a clear advantage in manufacturing because we don’t have to prepare the gripper for specific surfaces we want to lift. Gecko-inspired adhesives can lift flat objects like boxes then turn around and lift curved objects like eggs and vegetables,” said Michael Varenberg, the study’s principal investigator and an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

Current grippers on assembly lines, such as clamps, magnets, and suction cups, can each lift limited ranges of objects. Grippers based on gecko-inspired surfaces, which are dry and contain no glue or goo, could replace many grippers or just fill in capability gaps left by other gripping mechanisms.

Drawing out razors

The adhesion comes from protrusions a few hundred microns in size that often look like sections of short, floppy walls running parallel to each other across the material’s surface. How they work by mimicking geckos’ feet is explained below.

Up to now, molding has produced these mesoscale walls by pouring ingredients onto a template, letting the mixture react and set to a flexible polymer then removing it from the mold. But the method is inconvenient.

“Molding techniques are expensive and time-consuming processes. And there are issues with getting the gecko-like material to release from the template, which can disturb the quality of the attachment surface,” Varenberg said.

The researchers’ new method formed those walls by pouring ingredients onto a smooth surface instead of a mold, letting the polymer partially set then dipping rows of laboratory razor blades into it. The material set a little more around the blades, which were then drawn out, leaving behind micron-scale indentations surrounded by the desired walls.

Varenberg and first author Jae-Kang Kim published details of their new method in the journal ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces on April 6, 2020.

Forget about perfection

Though the new method is easier than molding, developing it took a year of dipping, drawing, and readjusting while surveying finicky details under an electron microscope.

“There are many parameters to control: Viscosity and temperature of the liquid; timing, speed, and distance of withdrawing the blades. We needed enough plasticity of the setting polymer to the blades to stretch the walls up, and not so much rigidity that would lead the walls to rip up,” Varenberg said.

Gecko-inspired surfaces have a fine topography on a micron-scale and sometimes even on a nanoscale, and surfaces made via molding are usually the most precise. But such perfection is unnecessary; the materials made with the new method did the job well and were also markedly robust.

“Many researchers demonstrating gecko adhesion have to do it in a cleanroom in clean gear. Our system just plain works in normal settings. It is robust and simple, and I think it has good potential for use in industry and homes,” said Varenberg, who studies surfaces in nature to mimic their advantageous qualities in human-made materials.

^{[Ready for graduate school with social distancing? Here's how to apply to Georgia Tech.]} 

Gecko foot fluff

Behold the gecko’s foot. It has ridges on its toes, and this has led some in the past to think their feet stick by suction or some kind of clutching by the skin. 

But electron microscopes reveal a deeper structure – spatula-shaped bristly fibrils protrude a few dozen microns long off those ridges. The fibrils make such thorough contact with surfaces down to the nanoscale that weak attractions between atoms on both sides appear to add up enormously to create overall strong adhesion.

In place of fluff, engineers have developed rows of shapes covering materials that produce the effect. A common shape makes a material’s surface look like a field of mushrooms that are a few hundred microns in size; another is rows of short walls like those in this study. 

“The mushroom patterns touch a surface, and they are attached straightaway, but detaching requires applying forces that can be disadvantageous. The wall-shaped projections require minor shear force like a tug or a gentle grab to generate adherence, but that is easy, and letting go of the object is uncomplicated, too,” Varenberg said.

Varenberg’s research team used the drawing method to make walls with U-shaped spaces in between them and walls with V-shaped spaces in between. They worked with polyvinylsiloxane (PVS) and polyurethane (PU). The V-shape made in PVS worked best, but polyurethane is the better material for industry, so Vanenberg’s group will now work toward achieving the V-shape gecko gripping pattern in PU for the best possible combination.

Also read: Lung-heart super sensor on a chip tinier than a ladybug

Here's how to subscribe to our free science and technology email newsletter

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-272-2780), email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology