A tunable dielectric to improve electrostatic adhesion in electrostatic/microstructured adhesives

Abstract This paper introduces a method to improve the electrostatic adhesion force of an electrostatic/microstructured (gecko-like) adhesive using a tunable dielectric layer doped with a highly polarizable material, Copper(II) Phthalocyanine. The dopant increases the relative permittivity of the base elastomer by more than two times. Numerical simulations demonstrate that increasing the dielectric's relative permittivity increases the electroadhesion force, and experimental results verify this by showing that adhesion of a flat (non-microstructured) sample can be improved up to four times. Adding microstructured adhesive elements on top of the doped layer yields a 2x improvement on a variety of materials.