Composite NanoStaples:

Ideas for composites repairing.

When we talk about carbon fiber repairing or any other composite material, there is not
much you can do nowadays, once you got a part that have an important crack we can do
several things, these two are the most common:
Adhesive layer: Add another layer and apply heat so we can fill up the hole on
the structure with a new layer of carbon fiber, this is expensive and not very useful
in many applications.
In Aircrafts, or other applications where we need good mechanical properties, is very
common to use this kind of patches to repair the structures, this brings us some
structural problems on the material due to the drilling that is necessary for this kind
of repairing.

So what is the deal with this patches and why we are losing mechanical properties, the
problem is the kind of joint that is made between the two parts; we are not going to explain
it very deep this, because we have studied it on another subject, but we know that these
fastened joints, due to the drilling and more things bring up a large stress

concentration, even though this kind of repairment is prefered in high added value
applications.
Now we can see the effect on the stress concentration of just one fastened joint, now
imagine the effect of 10 or 20 of them, not critical tough but we are losing properties.

And here we present you our idea, we would like to mixed the good properties of the
bolted repair and the good microstructural structure of the bond repairs, because
this last one doesnt introduce stress concentration.
But how we are going do this? We would try to take advantage of the nanoscience of
the gecko adhesion properties and using as a nanotechnology on the repair of
composite parts.
And where is the Nanoscience in the gecko?
geckos has the ability of run up and down a tree in any way, even with the head
downwards. Geckos, the world's supreme climbers, are capable of attaching and detaching
their adhesive toes in milliseconds while running. We know that this properties are given by

a hierarchical micro-nanostructured filaments on their feet.

During some studies we are now reaching to understand how this work and the strong it is,
two front feet of a gecko can withstand 20,1 N of force parallel to the surface (of
227 mm2); in the two feet we have 14.400 filament/mm2, that makes a 6,2E-6 N per
filament.
Another interesting property is that the deeper we go on the hierarchical structure the
better properties rise, here we can see a graph of the stress that can withstand and the
surface area of different parts of the gecko, from the total gecko to the spatula (the
filaments), in different tensional test.

At least seven possible mechanisms for gecko adhesion have been discussed over the
past 175 years: glue, suction, interlocking, friction, static electricity, capillary
forces and van der Waals adhesion. All but the latter two mechanisms had been
rejected by 1969.
Which one of those two is the most important? We run a test on a hydrophobic surface and
on a hydrophilic surface, there were no great variations on the results, so the capillary

adhesion forces are not dominant, so the Van der Waals adhesion forces are the key
ones.

Van der Waals force is largely independent of surface chemistry and highly
dependent on the distance between surfaces; thus it can be said that gecko adhesion
depends more on geometry than on chemistry. This discovery paved the way for fabrication
of synthetic gecko adhesives from a variety of materials. Gecko keratin proteins are not
required for fabrication of gecko-like adhesives; which is great, so other materials can be
used to fabricate the first prototype synthetic gecko spatulae that exhibited limited geckolike adhesion at the nanoscale.
The discovery that gecko adhere by van der Waals forces does not preclude an effect of
water under some conditions. Water is likely to alter contact geometry and adhesion
energies. Its concluded that humidity (i) modifies the contact geometry, increasing
adhesion and (ii) decreases the van der Waals Hamaker constant, reducing adhesion. These
two effects counteracted each other to yield an increase in adhesion from 7nN at low
humidity to 12nN at high humidity.
Knowing this, that is a Van der Waals driven mechanism and helped with water humidity is
good because we can take advantage of this at higher altitudes, where the planes are
flying, and where the mechanical properties have to withstand high tensions.

For airplane applications is good that is Van der Waals driven mechanism because the
humidity at high level of the atmosphere is lower.
How is this applied as an adhesive?
Using a nanostructure to create an adhesive is a novel and bizarre concept. Gecko-like
synthetic adhesives (GSAs) are under rapid development and with each generation more
gecko-like properties will emerge.
But in our case we are not looking for an exactly gecko-like adhesive, because the
gecko can attached to a surface as easy as it can be detached from a surface, this
for structural applications could be very dangerous, so for our prototype we would only like
take advantage of the attaching properties.
Prototype:
For our prototype we will use as filaments (or also called setae) the MultiWall
Carbon Nanotube Technology, that is a promising technology for development of Geckolike Synthetic Adhesives.

Each nanotube grown to a length of 50100m with a diameter of 1020nm could

function as individual spatulae. Nanoscale adhesion measurements of a MultiWall

Carbon Nanotube based Gecko-like Synthetic Adhesive produced nanoscale detachment

stresses up to 16MPa, 35 times the adhesive stress measured in a single gecko seta, 16MPa
only one filament or seta, imagine the properties of placing a few hundreds in a common
adhesive, imagine the mechanical properties.
So we will create a some kind of gel solution in which it will be full of carbon nanotube
place in the desired directions, and we will use this as an adhesive film that will connect the
composite material with the structural damage and the new composite material, making a
new continuous material saving the material from structural damage.
But, how could we orient the CNTs in the desired direction?
Recent studies have discovered that applying an electric field could be the answer. Carbon
Nanotubes show alignment to AC electric fields when they are inside a solvent/gel. The
main aspect to obtain a great orientation are the size (diameter and length) and number of
walls of the nanotubes, and the frequency of the applied field.

Advantages and Disadvantages:

The main advantage of this prototype is that is a solution for broken composites that
can reach high stress structural applications, without using patched with bolted joints

that decrease enormously the mechanical properties due to introducing distortion on the
matrix of the material.
The main disadvantage of when we use adhesive repairing for composite is that we cant
allow the material to break through the adhesive, so we have to run up test to prove
that the using of MultiWall Carbon Nanotubes increase as much as we think the mechanical
properties, the failure stresses and the direction of the critical tensions (not the same
charging perpendicular or parallel to the surface for the filaments).
Conclusions:
As a conclusion we think that this prototype of using nanotechnology to improve the
macrostructural properties is very interesting, due to the high increase of the mechanical
properties, and even more important the gigantic increase of using composite material (as
carbon fiber) on our day to day life, and if this prototype of Gecko-like Synthetic adhesive
works it can be a major breakthrough for many applications, from the aeroespacial, that is
already been said, to simple tennis rackets, or bikes, and much more.