Adhesion and friction characteristics of carbon nanotube arrays

There has been a great deal of interest in understanding, design and fabrication of bio-mimetic and bio-inspired adhesives in recent years. In this paper we present theoretical investigations on adhesion, friction behaviors and characteristics of fibrillar arrays composed of noninteracting carbon nanotubes for bio-inspired dry adhesives. Contact, compression, subsequent pulling off and dry sliding friction simulations were performed. It is demonstrated that there are two different adhesion forces during pull off. Static friction force values are in between 40 and 60 N cm⁻² at different loads and they are significantly larger than the normal adhesion forces. Dynamic friction force and load are anisotropic and they depend on the direction of the motion. It is also found that friction force values and friction coefficients decrease although contact length and contact area increase when the loads are high. This is due to the arms of the nanotubes which bend significantly and act as stiffer springs at high loads. (paper)