Adhesion in Capillary Assembled Origami Structures

Adhesion plays an important and often overlooked role in capillary assembly driven thin-film origami systems. Strong adhesion to a substrate can completely inhibit capillary forces from assembling a structure, while weak film-film adhesion means a structure may not be stable in the assembled configuration. In this work, we experimentally study thin-film/substrate and thin-film/thin-film adhesive interactions in order to explore the interplay between capillary forces, thin-film elasticity, bending, and adhesion. We use elastocapillary scaling models to highlight how the basic underlying physics can provide guidelines for building stable thin-film origami structures.