Wearable electronics are emerging as essential tools for health monitoring, haptic feedback, and human-computer interactions. While stable contact at the device-body interface is critical for these applications, it remains challenging due to the skin's softness, roughness, and mechanical variability. Existing methods, such as grounding structures or adhesive tapes, often suffer from contact loss, limited repeatability, and restrictions on the types of electronics they can support. Suction-based adhesives offer a promising alternative by generating negative pressure without requiring tight bands or chemical adhesives. However, most existing cup designs rely on rigid-surface assumptions and overlook mechanical interactions between suction cups and skin. Inspired by traditional cupping therapies, we present a suction-based adhesive system that attaches through elastic deformation and recovery. Using analytical modeling, numerical simulations, and experiments, we present a mechanics-based framework showing how suction performance depends on cup geometry, substrate compliance, and interfacial adhesion. We show that cup geometry should be tailored to substrate stiffness. Wide, flat sucti
Most tactile actuators create tactile sensations through vibrations or the mechanical and electrochemical formation of bumps. However, tactile sensations of real objects arise from friction which is derived not only from physical topography, but also surface chemistry. Here, we show that molecular rearrangement can be leveraged to create new classes of tactile actuators based on the phases of liquid crystals embedded in a solid and transparent polymer film. We found that humans can feel differences by touch, especially between planar alignment and its disrupted phase, as actuated by a DC electrical field. In subjective terms, the sensation was described as a tacky to polished-like feeling. We attribute the mechanism of tactile contrast to microscale phase separation and changes in molecular orientation, as the nanoscale differences in topography are too small to be detected on their own by humans. This molecular rearrangement occurs quicker (<17 ms) than actuation through ionic or fluid movement. This enables a new class of tactile actuators based on molecular orientation (TAMO) for haptic interfaces.
Bioinspired artificial surfaces with tailored adhesive properties have attracted significant interest. While fibrillar adhesive pads mimicking gecko feet are optimized for strong reversible adhesion, monolithic microsphere arrays mimicking the slippery zone of the pitchers of carnivorous plants of the genus Nepenthes show anti-adhesive properties even against tacky counterpart surfaces. In contrast to the influence of topography, the influence of relative humidity (RH) on adhesion has been widely neglected. Some previous works deal with the influence of RH on the adhesive performance of fibrillar adhesive pads. Commonly, humidity-induced softening of the fibrils enhances adhesion. However, little is known on the influence of RH on solid anti-adhesive surfaces. We prepared polymeric nanoporous monolithic microsphere arrays (NMMAs) with microsphere diameters of a few 10 μm to test their anti-adhesive properties at RHs of 2 % and 90 %. Despite the presence of continuous nanopore systems through which the inner nanopore walls were accessible to humid air, the topography-induced anti-adhesive properties of NMMAs on tacky counterpart surfaces were retained even at RH = 90 %. This RH-inde
In this paper we present a fast, new and easy method for the preparation of bentonite-g-poly(acrylate-co-acrylamide) composite material using microwave radiation. The composite has water absorptivity of 1002 g/g while the corresponding copolymer is tacky and has poor gel texture. The relative thermal stability of the composite in comparison with the copolymer was proved via thermogravimetric analysis These results indicate the synergistic effect of the bentonite with the copolymer by increasing water absorptivity and enhancing thermal and mechanical properties of the final gel. The composite was characterized by X-ray and FTIR. The influence of the environmental parameters on water absorptivity such as the pH and the ionic force was investigated
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