The world of soft robotics and wearables is experiencing a technological boom right now with new advancements being made in stretchable and flexible lithium-ion batteries (insert links), thin printable circuits, and even printable photovoltaics. Now a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has developed a new material that could revolutionize the way soft-robotics are thought about and developed.
This new material adapts its shape based on environmental conditions and electrical stimuli.
Image Credit: Carnegie Mellon University
This new material boasts both high electrical and thermal conductivity as well as being able to morph its shape on the fly as a response to its environment. It is not only thermally and electrically conductive, but it is also intelligent,” said Carmel Majidi, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who directs the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon. “Just like a human recoils when touching something hot or sharp, the material senses, processes, and responds to its environment without any external hardware. Because it has neural-like electrical pathways, it is one step closer to artificial nervous tissue.”
Majidi is no stranger to developing new exotic soft materials and has to lead his research team previously to create advanced material architectures using deformable liquid metal micro- and nano-droplets of gallium indium. However, this was the first time that his team deployed this technique in conjunction with liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), which is a type of shape-morphing rubber. Majidi and his research team collaborated with LCE expert Taylor Ware, a professor of bioengineering at the University of Texas, Dallas, and his graduate student, Cedric Ambulo.
Traditionally, LCEs are not electrically conductive and only respond to by moving when exposed to heat, making them useful for some applications, but not very useful for applications where electric stimuli would be beneficial. Research has shown that LCEs can be impregnated with rigid fillers such as carbon, and iron, but their ability to morph significantly decreases when those materials are added. Majidi and his team worked around this hinderance by combining liquid gallium with the LCE which formed a soft, stretchy composite that was also highly electrically conductive. As an added bonus, the material was quite robust and was able to self-heal somewhat when experiencing damage.
“We observed both electrical self-healing and damage detection capabilities for this composite, but the damage detection went one step further than previous liquid metal composites,” explained Michael Ford, a postdoctoral research associate in the Soft Machines Lab and the lead author of the study. “Since the damage creates new conductive traces that can activate shape-morphing, the composite uniquely responds to damage.”
One could see this new shape-shifting polymer being used in any number of niche applications such as self-repairing armor for robots sent into search and rescue situations after natural disasters, as a material that responds to human touch by changing it’s shape to more accurately take a blood pressure reading, or something as wild as responding to a radioactive signature and encapsulating and killing a cancerous pollock that was tagged with a radioactive nanobot. One thing is for sure, the future of robotics, medicine, and so many other fields will be filled with nano-robotics and exotic materials. How would you utilize this special material to revolutionize the medical industry? What else could it be used for? I’m very interested in your perspective on the new developments in soft electronics, soft robotics, and exotic materials. Leave me a comment and let me know!
Source: https://www.meche.engineering.cmu.edu/news/2019/10/almost-natural.html