Geckskin Adhesive Material, New Fabric Will Revolutionize Future Interior Decorating

Geckskin is an innovative adhesive material, one output of the Z-Man program. This new fabric will revolutionize future home decorating, allowing quickly place the TV, speakers, hooks, fireplace wall shelves or wall decor items and change interior decorating in no time, without using nails, brackets or consoles.

Geckskin will improve interior decorating or home staging and make life easier. No more worrying about whether hanging the TV, shelves or art works can damage the walls, because you used too large nails. This new material is reversible and strong, perfect for hanging items on walls and doors, including made of metal and glass.

The new adhesive material is a synthetically fabricated fabric inspired by the gecko’s ability to climb various surfaces, including vertical surfaces of different roughness. Scientists designed adhesive pads to mimic the gecko foot over multiple length scales, from the macroscopic foot tendons to the microscopic setae and spatulae, to maximize interactions with the surface.

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For years, biologists have been amazed by the power of gecko feet, which let these 5-ounce lizards produce an adhesive force roughly equivalent to carrying nine pounds up a wall without slipping.

A team of polymer scientists and biologist Duncan Irschick at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have discovered exactly how the gecko does it. The invented Geckskin is fabric pads that can hold 700 pounds on a very smooth vertical surface.

A piece of this special fabric (100 square cm, 4 x 4 inches ) can hold the weight of more than 700 lbs or 300 kg. During the presentation a piece of the size of a credit card was holding 42-inch LCD TV. Geckskin can be used like a piece of fabric, easily detached and then reused numerous times. Unlike Velcro, Geckskin does not require a special material on the other surface to adhere.

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It is important that the fabric looks like an ordinary fabric with a rubber coating, and does not lose its properties over time. It is easy to adhere and remove. The material is not sticky, not like a tape or glue. Instead, the material adheres to another surface because of the van der Waal forces between molecules on the two surfaces, which is the electrostatic attraction of the molecules on the two surfaces for each other, explain the scientists.

Van der Waal forces are why a vinyl decal adheres to a smooth glass or metal surface without being sticky. Geckskin is a totally different material than anything in the market. The fabric is capable of many many times that force, says Alfred J. Crosby, a polymer scientist and one of the team of researchers who developed this amazing, nature inspired, contemporary material.

Photo courtesy of Mike Bartlett, Duncan Irschick, Al Crosby, University of Massachusetts Amherst.

  by Ena Russ   
   15.09.2021