Seminars

Stimuli-responsive surfaces with tunable adhesive, fluidic and optical properties utilizing switchable surface topography are of significant interest for both scientific and engineering research. This talk presents recent outcomes from Seok Kim’s laboratory in terms of the biomimetic design of responsive surfaces with the abilities of switching surface properties. The first part introduces the shape memory effect of a shape memory polymer surface which is explored to enable not only high strength, reversible and repeatable dry adhesion, but also dynamically tunable surface wettability and liquid droplet manipulation. The second part demonstrates the transfer printing-based heterogeneous integration to form responsive composite surfaces with two examples. One is a black silicon-elastomer composite surface showing a switchable wetting mode between slippery lotus and adhesive rose petal states via a mechanical strain. The other example is a surface involving a nanostructured silicon scale array on a magnetically responsive elastomer micropillar array and its diverse functions, such as tunable wetting, droplet manipulation, tunable optical transmission and structural coloration, are demonstrated.