PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD | Table of Contents: |
My colleague John Jainschigg wrote recently about two separate teams of university researchers working on the development of artificial "skin." One of those teams, from Stanford University, has created a skinlike pressure sensor that is able to perceive even the slightest touch.
In their
research, which was published by Nature
Materials, the scientists sandwiched a carefully molded, highly flexible
layer of rubber between two parallel electrodes to create an extremely
sensitive device.
The artificial skin is sensitive enough to detect this lightweight Peruvian butterfly (source: Linda Cicero, Stanford University News Service).
"It detects pressures well below the pressure exerted by a 20-milligram bluebottle fly carcass we experimented with, and does so with unprecedented speed," said Zhenan Bao, an associate professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, in the press release.
The key to the new sensor is the thin layer of rubber, which is shaped into an array of thousands of nanoscale pyramids. This innovation allowed the researchers to move past previous unsuccessful attempts to create a sensor out of smooth material.
"We found that with a very thin continuous film, when you press on it, the material does not have room to expand," said Stefan Mannsfeld, a chemical engineer and co-author of the study. "So the molecules in the continuous rubber film are forced closer together and become entangled. When pressure is released, they cannot go back to the original arrangement, so the sensor doesn't work as well. The microstructuring we developed makes the rubber behave more like an ideal spring."
In the artificial "skin," the batterylike rubber stores electrical charges, which are released when pressure is exerted on the sensor. The electrodes detect this release of charge and are able to transmit what the sensor "feels." For the skin, the researchers created a new kind of transistor as a flexible alternative to traditionally rigid ones.
Including the rubber layer and both electrodes, the total thickness of the artificial "skin" is less than 1 millimeter. The largest sheet that the researchers have produced so far is about 7 centimeters on one side. The sheets are highly flexible, an essential quality that will allow them to wrap around curved surfaces like prosthetic and robotic limbs.
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