Mobile Liquid Gating Membrane System for Smart Piston and Valve Applications

Abstract

Rapid progress toward smart membranes has been made in the past few decades, of which the liquid gating membranes have attracted increasing attention because of their smart permeability. However, the current liquid gating membranes are mainly focused on the control of transmembrane performance, whereas the motion behaviors of such membranes that respond to ambient gas pressure are also very important for many applications in industry. Here, we developed a mobile liquid gating membrane system driven by dynamic changes in ambient gas pressure that can move as a piston depending on gas pressure. We further investigated the influences of membrane pore sizes and gating liquid types on the motion behavior of mobile liquid gating membranes. By incorporating with pneumatic elastomers, the liquid gating membrane system shows bistable gas transport properties that can serve as a smart valve. We believe the mobile liquid gating membrane system can provide a new platform for integrating simple control and logic function of soft actuators and robots.

Electrochemically and Mechanically Regulated Liquid Metal Gate via Giant Surface Tension Alteration

“…Liquid gate based on porous membranes has been proposed by Hou et al., which has abundant and reliable applications in the fields of substance transportation and separation, [ 9 ] controlled drug release. [ 10,11 ] But due to their tiny pores, the transportation efficiency of the substance transportation will be relatively low. More importantly, the opening of the liquid gate depends passively on the pressure from the injection of the multiphase mixtures, [ 4 ] which is constrained in broaden applications.…”

Bioinspired liquid gating membrane-based catheter with anticoagulation and positionally drug release properties

“…Rather than reconfiguring the solid geometry (24) or relying on molecular switches (25) or external gates (26), the membrane takes advantage of the unique ability of a fluid to deform and reconfigure in situ to respond to capillary pressure. Thus, it would bring many new potential applications, which could not be realized in traditional membrane materials (27)(28)(29)(30)(31).…”

Electrochemically mediated gating membrane with dynamically controllable gas transport

“…Moreover, MEMS-based gas valves may also suffer from laborious and expensive fabrication, mechanical instability, and high energy consumption, hindering their compatibility with large-scale applications. On the other hand, membrane-based systems for controllable gas transport have only been demonstrated very recently using liquid-infused microporous membranes, where gases can only permeate through the membrane on deformation of the pore-filling gating liquid meniscus above a specific pressure threshold (6,7,(16)(17)(18)(19)(20). Despite being a major breakthrough, the realization of continuous permeability adjustment in liquid-infused membranes may not be straightforward (7).…”