At the University of Louisville J. B. Speed School of Engineering
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.
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 transmission by changing the extrusion speed.
Poster time: Here is our embroidered linear motor. Most of this poster is captured in a journal article that came out shortly before the conference.
Next up was our collaboration with the Cai group at UCSD, using liquid crystal elastomer fibers to create active surfaces such as this one, with flaps that open under a heat lamp (speeded up 10x)
And on the last night, our summer REU student Canisha Ternival’s work on MEMS fiber grippers– check out the crab claw design grabbing on to fabric in the lower right. We are looking at grippers to attach sensors and actuators to porous surfaces.
Thanks to all summer 2018 collaborators for getting these projects off the ground.
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 build up more pressure, drive robotic actuators. Continue reading “Membrane-driven flow”
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. Each slider doubles the force and cuts the travel distance in half.
More details on this actuator in our new paper here, complete with candy-corn potential energy plots:
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 used embroidery to create spiral patterns of strong fibers. When inflated, these dome-like actuators rotate up to 180 degrees in the direction that straightens out the fibers. More details here:
