This is a tiny version of a bristlebot, threaded onto a copper wire. Instead of making it carry a self-contained motor and battery, we used the wire as an electromagnet to vibrate a small permanent magnet hanging below the device. Instead of toothbrush bristles, there is a goose down feather touching the wire. These ~1cm …
Category Archives: Lab News
Research for course credit
Capstone and independent study students can get University of Louisville course credit for working on projects in our lab. Fill out our interest form: https://harnettlab.org/about/ Sam’s board was able to connect and send its accelerometer data over WiFi. This semester’s Capstone team and independent study students carry on.
Materials Research Society presentations
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 …
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. …