Design of a metamaterial film with excellent conformability and adhesion for bandage substrates

Haotian Wang, Chen Pan, Haiyuan Zhao, Tingyu Wang, Yafeng Han*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

9 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Developing films with excellent conformability and adhesion has become a research hotspot in many fields, such as medical bandages. The conventional method for enhancing films conformability and adhesion is to make the films thinner or modify the material of the films, which usually compromises the function of the films. In this paper, a novel metamaterial film was proposed to cover the skin area of a human elbow during the rotation of elbow. This structure is composed of unit cells with rectangular perforations, whose Poisson's ratio (PR) is determined by the length of the perforation. With finite element analysis (FEA), relations among the stretch strain, Poisson's ratio and length of the perforation of unit cell was obtained. Then, the proposed film was generated by mapping unit cells with different PR to the target skin surface. With the same deformation behavior as the elbow skin, conformability and adhesion of the generated film can be guaranteed during the entire rotation process of the elbow, which has been verified by both FEA and experimental tests. Theoretically, by changing the arrangement of different PR unit cells, the proposed method can be applied to design films for other complex surface on human body. It also provides a new way to introduce materials with better biocompatibility but poor mechanical properties as bandage substrates. As a possible application, a prototype of smart bandage was developed by installing a high-resolution temperature sensor on the proposed film, which can monitor the inflammation of the wounded skin in real time.

Original languageEnglish
Article number104799
JournalJournal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials
Volume124
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Dec 2021

Keywords

  • Conformability and adhesion
  • Metamaterial film
  • Nonuniform Poisson's ratio distribution
  • Smart bandage

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Wang, H., Pan, C., Zhao, H., Wang, T., & Han, Y. (2021). Design of a metamaterial film with excellent conformability and adhesion for bandage substrates. Journal of the Mechanical Behavior of Biomedical Materials, 124, Article 104799. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmbbm.2021.104799