Towards Achieving Smart Adhesives: Mussel-Inspired Adhesives and Photodetachable Adhesives

Achieving smart adhesives that can work in wet environments and/or can be switched “on” and “off” on demand is promising to a wide range of applications ranging from drug-delivery to following whales and monitoring submarines. In this talk, we will briefly introduce underwater bonding, musselinspired adhesives, and present some of the work done to achieve what might be the strongest underwater adhesive found to date [1]. Furthermore, we will discuss the recent experiments and results on photodetachable adhesives [2].

References:
[1] North, M.A., Del Grosso, C.A. and Wilker, J.J., (2017). “High Strength Underwater Bonding with Polymer Mimics of Mussel Adhesive Proteins”. ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, 9(8), pp.7866-7872.
[2] Gao, Y., Wu, K. and Suo, Z., (2018). “Photodetachable Adhesion”. Advanced Materials, p.1806948.