Fabrication and Characterization of Thermoplastic Elastomer Dry Adhesives with High Strength and Low Contamination
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and polyurethane elastomers have commonly been used to manufacture mushroom shaped gecko-inspired dry adhesives with high normal adhesion strength. However, the thermosetting nature of these two materials severely limits the commercial viability of their manufacturing due to long curing times and high material costs. In this work, we introduce poly(styrene-ethylene/butylene-styrene) (SEBS) thermoplastic elastomers as an alternative for the manufacture of mushroom shaped dry adhesives with both directional and nondirectional performance. These materials are attractive for their potential to be less contaminating via oligomer transfer than thermoset elastomers, as well as being more suited to mass manufacturing. Low material transfer properties are attractive for adhesives that could potentially be used in cleanroom environments for microscale assembly and handling in which device contamination is a serious concern. We characterized a thermoplastic elastomer in terms of oligomer transfer using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and found that the SEBS transfers negligible amounts of its own oligomers, during contact with a gold-coated silicon surface, which may be representative of the metallic bond pads found in micro-electro-mechanical systems devices. We also demonstrate the fabrication of mushroom shaped isotropic and anisotropic adhesive fibers with two different SEBS elastomer grades using thermocompression molding and characterize the adhesives in terms of their shear-enhanced normal adhesion strength. The overall adhesion of one of the thermoplastic elastomer adhesives was found to be stronger or comparable to their polyurethane counterparts with identical dimensions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".