This video shows a stretchable optical fiber that can report its own length. We have been developing sensor fibers that work with stretchable materials like athletic tape. The screen in the background shows the light intensity decreasing as the tape is stretched, and climbing back up as the tape relaxes to its original length. The …
Category Archives: Lab News
Everyone needs more contacts
Last week I was at the 2017 ACM CHI conference in Denver. The conference covered human-computer interaction topics ranging from accessibility, to education, to new hardware and materials for interacting with computers. When it comes to analyzing what people are doing with input devices, machine learning turned up more often than not. People presented all kinds of outputs …
Moving water without moving parts
Jaz captured a video of his membrane pump moving water from left to right. The metallized membrane is a disc of about 1 cm diameter sandwiched between the pink layers of plastic, while metal tubes on either side supply an AC electric field. The voltage applied at the red and black clips is similar to …
Signs of life in the lab
Our projects are about integrating “functional” materials into larger structures, without damaging the material or the structure. Some examples of functions we want the materials to have are exerting forces, absorbing specific wavelengths, or turning a mechanical stress into an electronic signal. That won’t happen if we melted the material during installation (a real danger …
Bring it
Group meeting nearly overwhelmed this table at FirstBuild. Jaz brought new data and Shaf had a couple of new microfluidic devices; both projects involve membranes. Brian demoed his system for routing fiber actuators using a laser-cut template. Added to the pile: hollow fiber membranes from our collaborator at UK and a mechanism designed to work with an …