Bruce Lee, Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Michigan Technological University, and his team have developed a process whereby an adhesive can be deactivated by applying a small voltage. Tech Briefs: How did you get the idea for this project? Professor Bruce Lee: I had been investigating how mussels adhere to surfaces and I wanted to design a synthetic adhesive based on that. I started questioning whether there was a way to control the adhesion to the point where we could turn it on and then turn it back off. Tech Briefs: How is this different from other kinds of adhesion? Lee: Our adhesive and epoxy glues are both polymers but the key difference is that we add something to the chemical group so that it mimics a specific amino acid found in mussel-adhesive proteins. It is unique in that it can adhere to surfaces underwater, while most commercially available adhesives do not bond well to wet surfaces. Tech Briefs: How do you activate and deactivate the glues? Lee: We apply a voltage. In our setup, the adhesive is against a titanium sphere and we apply current to it through a platinum wire in the presence of saltwater. The sphere and the wire serve as positive and negative electrodes and the saltwater conducts the electricity to com-plete the circuit.
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