Building Magnetoresponsive Composite Elastomers for Bionic Locomotion Applications

Abstract

The ability of natural living organisms, transferring deformations into locomotion, has attracted researchers’ increasing attention in building bionic actuators and smart systems. As a typical category of functional materials, magnetoresponsive composite elastomers, comprised of flexible elastomer matrices and rigid magnetic particles, have been playing critical roles in this field of research due to their dynamic changes in response to applied magnetic field direction and intensity. The magnetically driven bionic actuators based on magnetoresponsive composite elastomers have been developed to achieve some specific functions in some special fields. For instance, under the control of the applied magnetic field, the bionic actuators can not only generate time-varying deformation, but also motion in diverse environments, suggesting new possibilities for target gripping and directional transporting especially in the field of artificial soft robots and biological engineering. Therefore, this review comprehensively introduces the component, fabrication, and bionic locomotion application of magnetoresponsive composite elastomers. Moreover, existing challenges and future perspectives are further discussed.

Microfluidic Applications of Artificial Cilia: Recent Progress, Demonstration, and Future Perspectives

“…The soft robots from the same study can crawl and roll, which can be controlled accurately by the magnetic field and inspired by the giant African millipede. Other recent discussions over artificial cilia embedded robotic engineering can be found elsewhere [ 164 , 165 , 166 ]. A computational model on Belousov−Zhabotinsky (BZ) cilia to create soft robots oscillating using light for the fluid environments was reported by Balazs et al [ 167 ].…”

Effects of soft and hard magnetic particles on the mechanical performance of ultra-soft magnetorheological elastomers

“…Smart actuators and sensors are based on the deformation that results from the internal torques [8,38,43,41,58,80,87,83,73]. Soft robotics, namely as bioengineering applications, are remotely actuated to perform complex and repeatable movements [19,20,22,30,35,43,45,47,55,56,77,76,86]. Also, hMREs have been used as multifunctional shape-changing structures, e.g., metamaterials and self-healing structures [29,42,48,53,68,16] and for industrial applications such as damping systems and electrical machines [1,52].…”

Influence of Combined Sulfur and Peroxide Curing Systems and Ageing on the Properties of Rubber Magnets

“…Due to their unique properties, they have been widely used as permanent flexible magnets, shielding devices, microwave absorbers or sensors of magnetic and electromagnetic fields. [ 1,2 ]…”