Research on new manufacturing technique of synthetic gecko’s foot-hair

Synthetic gecko adhesive technology is a new adhesive technology. This technology is based on the bionic structure of the geckos’ foot-hair. The synthetic gecko foot-hair achieves their adhesive function by the Van der Waals force, which is acted between the micro-synthetic gecko seta and the adhesive surface. Compared with some common adhesive technologies, synthetic gecko adhesive technology performs with low power consumption, high climbing, attachment/detachment manoeuvrability and being controlled easily. Thus, there are widespread application prospects with synthetic gecko adhesive technology in the military and civil use field. The key-point of achieving adhesive effect is how to manufacture the micro-synthetic gecko foot-hair. This paper proposes a new manufacturing technique to the synthetic gecko adhesive technology. Compared with existing manufacturing techniques, this paper will generalize merits and weaknesses for these manufacturing techniques, and analyze these appearance problems while manufacturing synthetic gecko foot-hair. On the basis of synthetic gecko setae theoretical models, combined with material characteristics which are used for manufacturing synthetic gecko setae, this new micro-manufacturing technique can solve these appearance problems for synthetic gecko foot-hair.