Harnett Lab

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 long devices travel toward the “bird” end of the feather when run at 100 Hz. The feather gives it a preferred direction of motion using natural “bristles” that are about 5-10 microns in diameter, the same size scale as the flexible microstructures we have been making in the cleanroom.

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.