A Better World by DESIGN

Matthew S. Hall
Gecko grip…Gecko Tape…Spiderman …Nice New Bandage Adhesion…
You don’t have to be in to comics to wonder if it could ever be possible to climb like Spiderman. Electrical engineer and Professor Ronald Fearing must have wondered something similar if not the same question. Fearing has studied the adhesion of the infamous gecko’s feet and taken a step closer at bringing this characteristic to our fingertips. The undersides of a gecko’s toes have millions of microscopic hairs which cling to surfaces when slid together. With a polyester sheet like that of milk jugs Fearing laid a sheet of fabric across it and melted it into the plastic. And after pulling the fabric off of the plastic sheet found that millions of microscopic polyester hairs sticking up similar to the geckos toes.
Professor Fearing is now experimenting with this in use of special tape. With a piece of this tape approximately the size of a postage stamp, slid onto a smooth surface he can hang a one pound weight- shown in the picture above. Unlike conventional adhesive tapes, this type of adhesion doesn’t stick when simply pressed against another surface. With a little sliding of the tape onto a surface the tiny little hairs grip and hold.
Imagine the potential for this new advancement- They’re thinking of bandages that don’t hurt to remove to start but the possibilities go on and on! And hey, perhaps we could put some of those plastic milk jugs to another use after they’re emptied. Recycle your milk jugs and contribute to better Band-Aids that don’t hurt to remove, maybe make Spidy- Suits for special force teams… I wonder if they were take a sheet of this polyester and stretch it in all directions and melt the fabric onto it, then remove the fabric and relax the polyester if it would multiply the number of hairs thus increasing the number of hairs per square inch. Would this then multiply the adhesion capabilities? I’ve been thinking about what I hope to areas I would like to design in after I finish my schooling and feel confident that at least one direction I will study/experiment and design in will be medical technologies. Hurray for gecko grip! I don’t like to use Band Aids because of how they pull your hairs when removed or how if you leave one on for more than a day they leave a sticky residue on you which doesn’t like to wash off quickly. We won’t have these problems if we can harness this nature inspired advancement in new designing.