Can You Climb Walls With Nano-Tape?

hey everyone today i'm going to be seeing if i can climb a wall like spiderman using nanotape or gecko tape as it's called nanotape is a specific type of tape that was invented in 2001 trying to mimic the feet of geckos now gecko's feet had always been a long-term mystery because scientists weren't quite sure how they actually stuck to walls so good they were able to withstand an extremely strong shear force but it didn't look like there were any adhesives on the bottom of their feet it wasn't until scanning electron microscopes were starting to be used more that scientists actually figured out how geckos were able to stick to surfaces so well and what they discovered is that the reason that geckos can stick to walls isn't because they have any special adhesive on their feet but what they do have is tiny little structures on their toes that branch out to even tinier structures on the order of the molecular scale that can induce van der waal forces to come into play now the van der waal force happens because we know that atoms are made of positive and negative charges at the center of the atom at the nucleus is the positive charge and then around the atom is negative charges so when you bring two atoms pretty close together what happens is those negative charges on the one side of the atom get pulled to the positive charges on the other atom and it pushes those other negative charges out of the way so if you can get molecules pretty close together no matter what they are they just kind of attract each other this attractive force is called the van der waal force now normally the van der waal force isn't very strong for example when i put my hand on the wall it's not like i can feel an attractive force to the wall mainly because there's not a lot of points where my finger is actually getting close enough to be close to the molecules on the wall there's only a few surfaces where my hand's actually even getting close enough to induce the van der waal force so all you need to do to increase that force is to increase the number of contact points and that's exactly what the foot of the gecko does for example there's around 14 000 of these tiny micro hairs per square millimeter on a gecko's foot that means there's over three and a half million contact points on the two front feet of a gecko now what's nice about this force is it takes a lot of contact points to make the total force so there's a really strong aversion to shearing meaning it doesn't want to slide one direction with all the contact points at once but it makes it pretty easy to just peel up individual contact points so what that means is that if you could mimic a gecko's foot you would have a really strong adhesive that won't shear very easily but you could still easily pull it right off if you just pull from the bottom and pull up now do you know what else geckos can do really well is hunt for their prey and that leads me to the sponsor of this video hunting clash hunting clash is a mobile game that simulates hunting in the wild it has amazing graphics and beautiful locations it's amazing to see these outdoor realistic beautiful scenes it's really cool you can travel across the world and explore different locations as well you have a large selection of weapons to choose from but one of my favorite features is that you can actually train a hunting dog that goes out with you and helps you in your hunt you can even take part in weekly competitions and test your skills against other players so help support the action lab by downloading the game using the qr code shown here or clicking the link in the description and you can also get a special gift when you use the code hunt with action lab you'll get 100 gold 70 skill tokens and two mythical lure cards that's a total of 15 when you use the code hunt with action lab and thanks again for hunting clash for sponsoring this video now let's get back to our experiment this is an adhesive that mimics a gecko's foot and the way it does that is with a bunch of tubes of carbon nanotubes that branch up and then those branch off even more into single carbon nanotubes and so those bunches of carbon nanotubes that branch off into singular carbon nanotubes make for a ton of contact points on a very small area of this tape so let's go ahead and see how strong this actually is so you can see this is pretty thick it's double-sided so this side has a layer that will peel off of it so it doesn't feel particularly sticky you can see it's kind of stretchy can stretch it out and rip it pretty easily so it kind of just feels like maybe a silicone a little bit okay so this is the size of the piece i'm gonna put on here it's a couple inches just gonna stick on the edge of my table like this so let's just try to stick this piece of aluminum to it so with minimal effort that is stuck on there then i can peel it off like that i don't even really have to push that hard i just kind of barely touch it to it and it sticks it stays on there pretty good look at that i just barely touched it to it like look i'm just barely holding it and it stays on there and i can set something on it that is amazing and it's pretty strong but i can start from one side and peel it off pretty easily now this is a piece of wax normally you'd have a hard time sticking some tape to wax but look i just stick this on here and it sticks just fine that is amazing look at this that is awesome well that is on there good i just barely touch it to it it just sticks the thing itself doesn't even have to be that clean i can just stick my hammer to it it just stays there then pull it off and it's ready to use now one thing to notice is that if you can ever create a force that starts peeling it from one direction then it doesn't stick very well for example if i give it a pivot point so that it wants to swing this way it can peel off really easily that's the direction that it'll naturally come unstuck by itself but if you're only applying a shear force straight down so it's just sharing across the surface then it can stay stuck on there really well now this is a smooth piece of teflon you can see i can even stick that to it and it stays stuck really well almost nothing will chemically bond to teflon but you can see that if it's a physical bond like a van der waals force then it can easily stick to it so this was able to hold all that stuff on there and i can easily peel it off like nothing another thing that's cool about this nano tape is that normally with regular adhesive tape you have to really worry about it getting dirty notice i was sticking kind of a rusty hammer on it and it was still able to stick but this nano tape and light gecko's feet have a natural self-cleaning ability so now let's go ahead and see if i can use this tape to actually climb walls so first i'll put it on my gloves now for my shoes i'm actually going to be putting the sticky tape on the inside of my shoe not on the bottom of my feet that's because in order to stay close to the wall i can spread my legs like this and get it on the inside but if it's on the bottom you can see that i'd have to have my body clear out here or even if it's on the tip of my toe your body has to be way far away from the wall and so i'm going to try to do it on the inside and see if that works better so this isn't exactly necessary but it's definitely going to help so is my nose even where it's supposed to be kind of so what are the chances this actually works joanna i say 10 chance you can move like a foot off the ground okay here we go i'm just going to grab onto the edge here okay okay here we go one two this take two yeah take two hey i can use it it actually worked but you were really only off the ground because you stepped on the table oh my god no the hands actually are sticking really well if i had four hands i could do this so needless to say this didn't work very well but surprisingly just this one glove on the wall almost supported my whole weight so this is definitely plausible if you can get the right mechanics and thanks again to hunting clash for sponsoring this video remember to download using the link in the description or the qr code shown here and thanks for watching another episode of the action lab i hope you enjoyed it if you did don't forget to subscribe if you haven't yet or hit the bell so you can be notified when i release my latest video and check out actionlab.com where i sell my experiment boxes and thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: The Action Lab

Views: 639,333

Keywords: nano tape, the action lab, gecko tape, alien tape, magic tape

Id: 4oE4VjTMn04

Length: 8min 31sec (511 seconds)

Published: Sat May 14 2022