NEW YORK: Spiderman fiction has turned into reality and the credit goes to climbing system inspired by geckos that made a dramatic experiment possible. The experiment had an 11-stone volunteer to crawl up a 12ft pane using sticky attachments on his hands and feet.
This demonstration was in a way similar to the shot in the movie Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol in which Tom Cruise clings to the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Tom had made use of sucker-gloves for it but for this experiment the gecko devices are far more sophisticated and real.
The sophisticated technology employs the same natural molecular forces that allow gecko lizards to scurry around on ceilings. The Electrostatic Van der Waals forces are brought into use by these creatures. These forces cause the neighbouring molecules to be attracted to each other. Though this attraction is very weak, still the effect is multiplied by thousands of tiny hair that cover a gecko’s toes, thereby allowing the lizards to stick firmly to surfaces.
The same principle has been adopted by the researchers to create tiny tiles, called “microwedges”. These are capable of generating Van der Waals forces and produce a dry adhesive even more efficiently than the geckos.
The US team led by Dr. Elliot Hawks, from Stanford University wrote about it in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. He said, “Using this system, a human of mass 70 kilograms (11 stone) successfully ascended a 3.6-metre vertical glass wall with 140 square centimetres of gecko-inspired dry adhesives in each hand. We tested hundreds of individual steps on glass with the 70kg climber and 140 square centimetres of adhesive without failure”.
The application of this technology might be useful in helping the astronauts get around in weightless conditions.
