The most well liked drink of the summer season often is the SEAS-colada. This is what it’s worthwhile to make it: gin, pineapple juice, coconut milk and a dielectric elastomer actuator-based delicate peristaltic pump. Sadly, the final part can solely be discovered within the lab of Robert Wooden, the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Utilized Sciences on the Harvard John A. Paulson College of Engineering and Utilized Sciences.
At the very least, for now.
Wooden and his crew designed the pump to resolve a significant problem in delicate robotics — methods to substitute historically cumbersome and inflexible energy elements with delicate alternate options.
Over the previous a number of years, Wooden’s Microrobotics Lab at SEAS has been creating delicate analogues of historically inflexible robotic elements, together with valves and sensors. In fluid-driven robotic programs, pumps management the strain or circulate of the liquid that powers the robotic’s motion. Most pumps obtainable at the moment for delicate robotics are both too massive and inflexible to suit onboard, not highly effective sufficient for actuation or solely work with particular fluids.
Wooden’s crew developed a compact, delicate pump with adjustable strain circulate 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 delicate haptic units and a delicate robotic finger.
The pump’s dimension, energy and flexibility opens up a spread of prospects for delicate robots in quite a lot of purposes, together with meals dealing with, manufacturing, and biomedical therapeutics.
The analysis was revealed just lately in Science Robotics.
Peristaltic pumps are extensively utilized in trade. These easy machines use motors to compress a versatile tube, making a strain differential that forces liquid via the tube. Most of these pumps are particularly helpful in biomedical purposes as a result of the fluid does not contact any part of the pump itself.
“Peristaltic pumps can ship liquids with a variety of viscosities, particle-liquid suspensions, or fluids reminiscent of blood, that are difficult for different sorts of pumps,” stated first writer Siyi Xu, a former graduate pupil at SEAS and present postdoctoral fellow in Wooden’s lab.
Constructing off earlier analysis, Xu and the crew designed electrically powered dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) to behave because the pump’s motor and rollers. These delicate actuators have ultra-high energy density, are light-weight, and might run for a whole bunch 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 strain waves.
The result’s a centimeter-sized pump sufficiently small to suit on board a small delicate robotic and highly effective sufficient to actuate motion, with controllable strain, circulate fee, and circulate route.
“We additionally demonstrated that we might actively tune the output from steady circulate to droplets by various the enter voltages and the outlet resistance, in our case the diameter of the blunt needle,” stated Xu. “This functionality could permit the pump to be helpful not just for robotics but additionally for microfluidic purposes.”
“The vast majority of delicate robots include inflexible elements someplace alongside their drivetrain,” stated Wooden. “This subject began as an effort to swap out a type of key items, the pump, with a delicate various. However alongside the way in which we realized that compact delicate pumps could have far higher 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 Nationwide Science Basis below grant CMMI-1830291.
Video: https://youtu.be/knC9HJ6K-sU