Nanofibrous Adhesion: The Twin of Gecko Adhesion

Abstract

Inspired by dusty spider dragline silk, we studied the adhesive interaction between artificial nanofibers and their aerosol surroundings. The nanofibers are found to be able to actively capture particulate matters from the environment, exactly as the spider dragline silk does. Examinations prove that such nanofibrous adhesion is insensitive to the chemical nature of the fibers and the physical states of the particulate matter and depends only on the fiber diameters. Such facts indicate that nanofibrous adhesion is a case of dry adhesion, mainly governed by van der Waals force, sharing the same mechanism to gecko adhesion. Nanofibrous adhesion is of great importance and has promising potential. For instance, in this work, nanofibers are fabricated into a thin and translucent filter, which has a filtration performance, as high as 95%, that easily outperformed ordinary ones. We believe that this adhesive property of nanofibers will open up broader applications in both scientific and industrial fields.

Spider‐Web‐Inspired PM0.3 Filters Based on Self‐Sustained Electrostatic Nanostructured Networks

“…[14][15][16] Nature provides a bio-inspiration associated with filter construction: creating fibrous network structures can dramatically improve material utilization and the resultant properties. [17][18][19] The natural dusty spider webs are vivid case of nature power. To mimic the spider web structures at nanoscale, previously, pieces of 2D web-like structures with fiber diameter (<50 nm), were found in our group.…”

Adhesion Tuning at Superhydrophobic States: From Petal Effect to Lotus Effect

“…[37] When being contacted at the nanoscale, the nanofibers were able to generate considerable stickiness, the merit of which was van der Waals forces. [38,39] Such force was non-chemically-specified and enabled the nanofibrous structures holding water droplets firmly. The interactions between the strings and the water droplet was considerably large.…”

Multifunctional anti-wax coatings for paraffin control in oil pipelines

“…In recent years, a large number of researchers have applied the idea of bionics to the study of functional materials and have tried to learn from and imitate the effective structures in nature after their long evolution. These include the superhydrophobic structure on the upper surface of leaves (Gong et al 2012(Gong et al , 2015aCheng et al 2011), the superoleophobic structure of the lower surface of the lotus leaf and the surface of fish skin (Liu et al 2009;Ma et al 2014;Gao et al 2016;Chen et al 2016), the water-collecting structure of the back of beetles (Parker and Lawrence 2001), the back groove of Opuntia cactus and spider silk structure (Gong et al 2015b;Bai et al 2015) and organic and inorganic composite structure of pearl shell layers (Guo et al 2016;Xu et al 2013). Among these, some researchers focused on pipeline anti-wax works, and research results are quite abundant.…”