Stronger tape engineered through the art of cutting

We got inspired by art to create engineering designs. In one approach, what we wanted to do was to utilize this kirigami technique, where you can add cuts to films to control their properties. Most adhesives, you take them, put them in contact with a substrate and then all you do is take one side of it and you peel it off. And that separation of the interface always goes in one forward direction. And that sets the adhesion capacity of that film. What we did was by adding cuts, the same adhesive material. It's the same adhesive, the same backing. We apply it in the same way. Now when we take the front of this film, we begin to peel it. Something different happens. What happens is that every time that separation gets to one of those cuts, it gets stuck. To unstick it, we actually have to pull harder to separate it. This continues down the whole film, where I have to peel it aggressively every time it gets to one of those features. But what's so interesting about these features is that I can actually grab the adhesive from the other side and I can peel it off just as easily as I did that unpatterned piece of adhesive film. By working with our collaborators at the University of Colorado Boulder, Rong Long, we found out that you can't just make any cut. In fact, you have to design these cuts specifically. If they're too small, it won't work. If they're too big, you won't get as much enhanced capacity as you possibly could. Making the right cut in the adhesive is important. As you see here. You can easily design the number of flats in the given area. You can change and tune, the enhancement of the adhesive. So we normally just like design or make a prototype with software. Then we use the laser cutter to let it cut it. As we design. We can utilize our technique in a wide variety of adhesives. We can make the weak adhesive stronger, and we can actually make strong adhesives even stronger while still maintaining the ability to have reusability, as well as that easy release. And this really opens up a whole new design space in adhesives and their applications.