The hottest drink of the summer time will be the SEAS-colada. Here’s what it is advisable to make it: gin, pineapple juice, coconut milk and a dielectric elastomer actuator-based smooth peristaltic pump. Unfortunately, the final element can solely be discovered within the lab of Robert Wood, the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences on the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
At least, for now.
Wood and his crew designed the pump to resolve a significant problem in smooth robotics — the best way to exchange historically cumbersome and inflexible energy elements with smooth options.
Over the previous a number of years, Wood’s Microrobotics Lab at SEAS has been growing smooth analogues of historically inflexible robotic elements, together with valves and sensors. In fluid-driven robotic methods, pumps management the stress or circulation of the liquid that powers the robotic’s motion. Most pumps out there at present for smooth robotics are both too giant and inflexible to suit onboard, not highly effective sufficient for actuation or solely work with particular fluids.
Wood’s crew developed a compact, smooth pump with adjustable stress circulation versatile sufficient to pump quite a lot of fluids with various viscosity, together with gin, juice, and coconut milk, and highly effective sufficient to energy smooth haptic units and a smooth robotic finger.
The pump’s dimension, energy and flexibility opens up a variety of potentialities for smooth robots in quite a lot of functions, together with meals dealing with, manufacturing, and biomedical therapeutics.
The analysis was printed lately in Science Robotics.
Peristaltic pumps are extensively utilized in trade. These easy machines use motors to compress a versatile tube, making a stress differential that forces liquid by means of the tube. These sorts of pumps are particularly helpful in biomedical functions as a result of the fluid would not contact any element of the pump itself.
“Peristaltic pumps can ship liquids with a variety of viscosities, particle-liquid suspensions, or fluids similar to blood, that are difficult for different sorts of pumps,” stated first creator Siyi Xu, a former graduate scholar at SEAS and present postdoctoral fellow in Wood’s lab.
Building off earlier analysis, Xu and the crew designed electrically powered dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) to behave because the pump’s motor and rollers. These smooth actuators have ultra-high energy density, are light-weight, and might run for tons of of 1000’s of cycles.
The crew designed an array of DEAs that coordinate with one another, compressing a millimeter-sized channel in a programmed sequence to provide stress waves.
The result’s a centimeter-sized pump sufficiently small to suit on board a small smooth robotic and highly effective sufficient to actuate motion, with controllable stress, circulation price, and circulation course.
“We additionally demonstrated that we may actively tune the output from steady circulation to droplets by various the enter voltages and the outlet resistance, in our case the diameter of the blunt needle,” stated Xu. “This functionality might enable the pump to be helpful not just for robotics but additionally for microfluidic functions.”
“The majority of sentimental robots comprise inflexible elements someplace alongside their drivetrain,” stated Wood. “This matter began as an effort to swap out a kind of key items, the pump, with a smooth different. But alongside the way in which we realized that compact smooth pumps might have far better utility, for instance in biomedical settings for drug supply or implantable therapeutic units.”
The analysis was co-authored by Cara M. Nunez and Mohammad Souri. It was supported by the National Science Foundation beneath grant CMMI-1830291.
Video: https://youtu.be/knC9HJ6K-sU