Research by Cornelia Meissner*. M. Saad Bhamla, Todd Emrick* and Alfred J. Crosby* was published in Soft Matter. The paper is entitled, "Fabricating mesoscale polymer ribbons with tunable mechanical properties via evaporative deposition and dewetting."
This new article came from a collaboration of biologist Saad Bhamla from Georgia Tech with chemistry (Todd Emrick) and engineering (Al Crosby) at PSE UMass. This collaborative work takes inspiration from nature and translates it into the first-ever soft synthetic mesoscale ribbons. Profound understanding of engineering allowed the deposition of distinct lines with complete dewetting of inter-ribbon layers. The need for etching or prepatterning was eliminated. Knowledge of structure-property relationships allowed researchers to tune the elastic modulus over two orders of magnitude.