The project investigates an interesting natural phenomenon of scientific importance and significance, i.e. how can marine mussels achieve strong anchorages on various wet surfaces through mussel plaques in order to survive the turbulent marine environment? Even though earlier attempts have been made, understanding the unique physical behaviours of the adhesive structures of marine mussel plaques, which can adapt to various underlying surfaces, still remains elusive. The originality of the research lies in (1) developing novel understanding on the complex plaque-surface interaction events through manipulating the stiffness and the surface texture pattern of the underlying surface; (2) establishing the critical principles to design the high performance porous materials inspired by marine mussel plaques, which leads to creation of novel, ultralightweight, high performance engineering structures for aerospace and transportation structure applications; and (3) establishing the novel solutions for joining dissimilar engineering materials, inspired by plaque-surface interaction, which provide reliable connections for hybrid composite structures .

More discription can be found in the link