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Substrate Enabled Liquid Metal Machine

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Liquid Metal Soft Machines

Part of the book series: Topics in Mining, Metallurgy and Materials Engineering ((TMMME))

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Abstract

Although liquid metals such as eutectic gallium–indium and gallium–indium–tin have been found extremely important in making various kinds of soft machines, there however always exists a big challenge to flexibly and stably control the shape of liquid metal due to its extremely high surface tension. Along this direction, the present lab (Hu et al. in Adv Mater 28:9210–9217, 2016 [1]) made a fundamental discovery that the bouncing bright liquid metal droplet in alkaline electrolyte can be transformed to a flat and dull puddle when placed on graphite surface. Through the intrinsic interactions between liquid metal and graphite, the liquid metal puddle on graphite can be manipulated as desired into various stable shapes with sharp angles in semi-open space via a simple and highly feasible way. Moreover, it was also disclosed that the electric field can be flexibly applied to control the transformation, locomotion even anti-gravity behavior of liquid metal puddle on graphite. Such phenomena are fundamentally different from those observed before when placing liquid metal on glass substrate. Further, if the liquid metal was fed with aluminum in advance, the graphite-like substrate would induce a group of very unusual amoeba-like behaviors for such self-driven liquid metal machines. With basic science value and practical significance, these finding suggests a pivotal strategy for liquid metal patterning as well as developing future soft mobile machine owning three-dimensional locomotion capability. It also adds new knowledge for understanding the liquid metal science. This chapter presents the typical strategies and mechanisms in manipulating the liquid metal and the allied machine systems inside the electrolyte environment.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

    Jing Liu

  2. Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Lei Sheng

  3. College of Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China

    Zhi-Zhu He

Authors
  1. Jing Liu
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  2. Lei Sheng
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  3. Zhi-Zhu He
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jing Liu .

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Liu, J., Sheng, L., He, ZZ. (2019). Substrate Enabled Liquid Metal Machine. In: Liquid Metal Soft Machines. Topics in Mining, Metallurgy and Materials Engineering. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2709-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2709-4_13

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-13-2708-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-13-2709-4

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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