Photodetachable Adhesion

Peeling from strong adhesion is hard, and sometimes painful. Herein, an approach is described to achieve both strong adhesion and easy detachment. The latter is triggered, on-demand, through an exposure to light of a certain frequency range. The principle of photodetachable adhesion is first demonstrated using two hydrogels as adherends. Each hydrogel has a covalent polymer network, but does not have functional groups for bonding, so that the two hydrogels by themselves adhere poorly. The two hydrogels, however, adhere strongly when an aqueous solution of polymer chains is spread on the surfaces of the hydrogels and is triggered to form a stitching polymer network in situ, in topological entanglement with the pre-existing polymer networks of the two hydrogels. The two hydrogels detach easily when the stitching polymer network is so functionalized that it undergoes a gel–sol transition in response to a UV light. For example, two pieces of alginate–polyacrylamide hydrogels achieve adhesion energies about 1400 and 10 J m ⁻² , respectively, before and after the UV radiation. Experiments are conducted to study the physics and chemistry of this strong and photodetachable adhesion, and to adhere and detach various materials, including hydrogels, elastomers, and inorganic solids.