Abstract
Reversible transformation of a liquid metal machine holds enormous promise across many scientific areas ranging from mechanical engineering to applied physics. So far, such capabilities are still hard to achieve through conventional rigid materials or depending mainly on elastomeric materials, which however imply somewhat limited performances and require complicated manipulations. The present lab (Zhang et al. in Synthetically chemical–electrical mechanism for controlling large-scale reversible deformation of liquid metal objects, 4:7116, 2014, [1]) established a basic strategy which is fundamentally different from the existing ones to realize large-scale reversible deformation through controlling the working materials of liquid metal. The method is termed as synthetically chemical–electrical mechanism and abbreviated as SCHEME. Such activity incorporates an object of liquid metal whose surface area could spread up to five times of its original size and vice versa under low energy consumption. Particularly, the alterable surface tension based on combination of chemical dissolution and electrochemical oxidation is ascribed to the reversible shape transformation, which works much more flexible than many former deformation principles through converting electrical energy into mechanical movement. A series of very unusual phenomena regarding the reversible configurational shifts are disclosed with dominant factors clarified. Such finding suggests a generalized way to combine the liquid metal serving as shape-variable element with the SCHEME to compose functional soft machines or devices, which implies the big potential for developing future smart robots to fulfill various complicated tasks. This chapter illustrates the basic SCHEME to realize the reversible transformation of liquid metal machine.
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Liu, J., Sheng, L., He, ZZ. (2019). Reversible Transformation of 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_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2709-4_5
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