A reliable method to measure the adhesive force with a tiny amount of adhesive material

Abstract

A new method is proposed and developed to measure adhesive forces by use of the force-distance curve of a micro cantilever with an extremely small amount of testing material such as adhesive proteins. The contact area should be well-controlled at a reasonable value. Even though the area is desired to be as small as possible, a contact region of several micrometers by several micrometers is adopted in order to avoid obtaining meaningless measured values and uncertainty in the contact areas. An AFM cantilever is used after having been modified with a micro glass bead to enlarge the contact area for adhesion. A glass plate with micro-scale circular patterns is fabricated from a glass wafer by micro-machining processes in order to control precisely the contact area in adhesion tests. In the proposed method the adhesive materials are directly applied to the bead attached at the AFM cantilever before it is applied on the top area of the truncated cone on the fabricated glass plate. The developed method is applied to measure the adhesive forces of Cell-Tak (R) (which is a commercial extracted mussel adhesive) and recombinant Mgfp-5 (which is a recombinant mussel adhesive protein) and the statistical credibility of the measured adhesive force data is enormously improved as a result.