The realization of liquid metal-based wearable systems will be a milestone toward high-performance, integrated electronic skin. However, despite the revolutionary progress achieved in many other components of electronic skin, liquid metal-based flexible sensors still suffer from poor sensitivity due to the insufficient resistance change of liquid metal to deformation. Herein, a nacreinspired architecture composed of a biphasic pattern (liquid metal with Cr/Cu underlayer) as "bricks" and strain-sensitive Ag film as "mortar" is developed, which breaks the long-standing sensitivity bottleneck of liquid metal-based electronic skin. With 2 orders of magnitude of sensitivity amplification while maintaining wide (>85%) working range, for the first time, liquid metal-based strain sensors rival the state-of-art counterparts. This liquid metal composite features spatially regulated cracking behavior. On the one hand, hard Cr cells locally modulate the strain distribution, which avoids premature cut-through cracks and prolongs the defect propagation in the adjacent Ag film. On the other hand, the separated liquid metal cells prevent unfavorable continuous liquid-metal paths and create crack-free regions during strain. Demonstrated in diverse scenarios, the proposed design concept may spark more applications of ultrasensitive liquid metal-based electronic skins, and reveals a pathway for sensor development via crack engineering.
This paper presents a new optimization method for dynamic design of planar linkage with clearances at joints. The general consideration is to optimize the mass distribution of links to reduce the change of joint forces. The mass, the center position of mass and the moment of inertia the moving links are taken as the optimizing variables. The objective functions are taken as the changes of the amplitude and direction of the joint forces and they are minimized. The optimized result shows that the magnitude of joint force can be controlled hardly to change and the direction of joint force can be controlled to change smoothly with respect to the crank angle, although the clearances exist at the joints. The link shape can be formed with the optimized variables by using the small element superposing method (SESM) and a design example is given.
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