Here are the group’s presentations at the Materials Research Society fall meeting in Boston last week. One talk and 3 late-night posters; the abstracts are available online here. The common theme was fibers as sensors, actuators and structural components. In this work with the Kate group at U of Louisville, we modified our stretchable optical fibers’ light …
Author Archives: cindy.harnett@louisville.edu
Membrane-driven flow
Here is our poster on driving flows with metal-coated membranes in AC electric fields from the 2018 APS DFD conference. It is a recap of group alum Dr. Jaz Beharic’s membrane pumping work with newer results on the flow rate. (Related video). Such membranes could potentially drive flows in lab-on-a-chip devices or when stacked to …
Slider mania
We printed some little sliders to make our embroidered motors pull with more force. The tradeoff is a shorter travel distance. It took about 8 minutes to assemble the three sliders by hand, a process we aim to speed up with automation in an upcoming project. Below you can see two compound sliders in action. …
Fiber-reinforced actuators with a twist!
Soft robots move, squish, and bend more like living creatures than like nuts-and-bolts contraptions. Researchers are developing soft robots for applications that interact with people. Most (but not all) are based on inflatable silicone rubber materials, and some use tough strings and fibers to control which parts of the structure are allowed to expand. We …
1% inspiration, 99% glue
Shaf is putting together some membrane reactors for testing the efficiency of enzymes at chewing up leftover organic matter (think grass clippings or crop waste) to turn it into fuels and other useful products. There is a lot of gluing involved in the prototypes. Laser-cut acrylic pieces plus a membrane form a chamber to send …