Inspiration from the natural world: Boosting flexible electronics
With increased study of bio-adhesives, a significant effort has been made in search for novel adhesives that will combine reversibility, repeated usage, stronger bonds and faster bonding time, non-toxic, and more importantly be effective in wet and other extreme conditions.
A team of Korean scientists?made up of scientists from Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) and UNIST has recently found a way to make building flexible pressure sensors easier—by mimicking the suction cups on octopus’s tentacles.
In their paper published in the current edition of Advanced Materials, the research team describes how they studied the structure and adhesive mechanism of octopus suckers and then used what they learned to develop a new type of suction based adhesive material.
According to the research team, “Although flexible pressure sensors might give future prosthetics and robots a better sense of touch, building them requires a lot of laborious transferring of nano- and microribbons of inorganic semiconductor materials onto polymer sheets.”
In search of an easier way to process this transfer printing, Prof. Hyunhyub Ko (School of Energy and Chemical Engineering, UNIST) and his colleagues turned to the octopus suction cups for inspiration.
An octopus uses its tentacles to move to a new location and uses suction cups underneath each tentacle to grab onto something. Each suction cup contains a cavity whose pressure is controlled by surrounding muscles. These can be made thinner or thicker on demand, increasing or decreasing air pressure inside the cup, allowing for sucking and releasing as desired.
By mimicking muscle actuation to control cavity-pressure-induced adhesion of octopus suckers, Prof. Ko and his team engineered octopus-inspired smart adhesive pads. They used the rubbery material polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) to create an array of microscale suckers, which included pores that are coated with a thermally responsive polymer to create sucker-like walls.
The team discovered that the best way to replicate organic nature of muscle contractions would be through applied heat. Indeed, at room temperature, the walls of each pit sit in an ‘open’ state, but when the mat is heated to 32°C, the walls contract, creating suction, therby allowing the entire mate to adhere to a material (mimicking the suction function of an octopus). The adhesive strength also spiked from .32 kilopascals to 94 kilopascals at high temperature.
The team reports that the mat worked as envisioned—they made some indium gallium arsenide transistors that sat on a flexible substrate and also used it to move some nanomaterials to a different type of flexible material.
Prof. Ko and his team expect that their smart adhesive pads can be used as the substrate for wearable health sensors, such as Band-Aids or sensors that stick to the skin at normal body temperatures but fall off when rinsed under cold water.
Learn more: UNIST to Engineer Octopus-Inspired Smart Adhesive Pads
The Latest on: Flexible pressure sensors
[google_news title=”” keyword=”Flexible pressure sensors” num_posts=”10″ blurb_length=”0″ show_thumb=”left”]
via Google News
The Latest on: Flexible pressure sensors
- Seat occupancy sensors and gaming – IDTechEx explores printed and flexible sensorson May 7, 2024 at 4:01 am
Battery health monitoring in electric vehicles using multi-functional hybrid sensors is an emerging role for printed and flexible sensors. Temperature and pressure sensors can be integrated together ...
- Flexible Sensor Market to Reach $11.2 Billion Globally by 2032 at 7.7% CAGR: Allied Market Researchon April 30, 2024 at 4:54 am
Report Coverage & Details: Product Type: Flexible Pressure Sensor Sub-segment to be the Most Dominant During the Forecast Period The flexible pressure sensor sub-segment accounted for the largest ...
- Flexible Sensor Market to Reach $11.2 Billion Globally by 2032 at 7.7% CAGR: Allied Market Researchon April 30, 2024 at 2:55 am
The rising popularity of wearable devices and continuous technological advancements are projected to drive the global flexible sensor market's growth during the forecast period from 2032 to 2032. The ...
- Flexible Sensor Market to Reach $11.2 Billion Globally by 2032 at 7.7% CAGR: Allied Market Researchon April 29, 2024 at 10:50 pm
The rising popularity of wearable devices and continuous technological advancements are projected to drive the global flexible sensor market's growth during the forecast period from 2032 to 2032.
- Ultra-resilient flexible sensors break new ground in pressure detectionon April 15, 2024 at 5:00 pm
In recent advancements, flexible pressure sensors have been developed to mimic human skin's sensitivity, significantly benefiting fields like interactive technologies, health monitoring ...
- Flex PCBs Make Force-Mapping Pressure Sensor For Amputeeon April 8, 2019 at 5:00 pm
But no matter what advanced sensors and actuators are ... Measuring and mapping the pressure on the residual limb is the business of this flexible force-sensing matrix. The idea for a two ...
- Tactile Pressure Sensors Informationon February 11, 2018 at 6:41 am
Tactile pressure sensors are used to detect the pressure distribution between a sensor and a target. They are often used as robot grippers or flat tactile arrays. Flexible sensors can be molded to ...
- Pressure Sensors Informationon February 8, 2018 at 10:54 am
Mechanical deflection uses an elastic or flexible element to mechanically deflect with a change in pressure, for example a diaphragm, Bourdon tube, or bellows. Diaphragm Pressure Sensor Piezoelectric ...
via Bing News