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  4. GLUE: Grip Likelihood In Underwater Environments

GLUE: Grip Likelihood in Underwater Environments

 

Summary

The defense, research, and commercial sectors are deploying an increasing amount of human-developed technology underwater. 

When these technologies need repair or modification, bringing them to the surface is often prohibitively costly and/or infeasible. Improving the ability to service these items while in the water could dramatically increase the array of deployable technologies and how they are employed. Adhesive repair can often be performed faster and with less environmental disturbance than techniques such as welding and mechanical fastening.

One key tool is lacking: underwater adhesives. 

Current adhesives for these applications cannot cure underwater because the interfacial liquid layer prevents the necessary contact between adhesive and substrate. Overcoming this challenge requires an understanding of the mechanisms that govern why small amounts of liquid get trapped between two surfaces. 

While advances in computation have enabled tremendous strides in fluid dynamics, little work has been done to model how interfacial liquid is expelled as surfaces come into contact within an aqueous medium.

This ARC Opportunity is exploring the question: Can adhesives be designed for the underwater environment using broadly applicable models that govern how small amounts of trapped liquid vacate the space between two surfaces as they make contact with one another?

 

 

This program is now complete

This content is available for reference purposes. This page is no longer maintained.

 

Opportunity

DARPA-EA-23-01-04

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