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

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.

Keywords: Conformability and adhesion; Metamaterial film; Nonuniform Poisson's ratio distribution; Smart bandage.