The most popular drink of the summer season often is the SEAS-colada. Here is what you want to make it: gin, pineapple juice, coconut milk and a dielectric elastomer actuator-based tender peristaltic pump. Sadly, the final element 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 Faculty of Engineering and Utilized Sciences.
At the least, for now.
Wooden and his group designed the pump to resolve a significant problem in tender robotics — the way to exchange historically cumbersome and inflexible energy parts with tender options.
Over the previous a number of years, Wooden’s Microrobotics Lab at SEAS has been creating tender analogues of historically inflexible robotic parts, together with valves and sensors. In fluid-driven robotic methods, pumps management the strain or move of the liquid that powers the robotic’s motion. Most pumps accessible right now for tender robotics are both too massive and inflexible to suit onboard, not highly effective sufficient for actuation or solely work with particular fluids.
Wooden’s group developed a compact, tender pump with adjustable strain move versatile sufficient to pump a wide range of fluids with various viscosity, together with gin, juice, and coconut milk, and highly effective sufficient to energy tender haptic units and a tender robotic finger.
The pump’s measurement, energy and flexibility opens up a spread of potentialities for tender robots in a wide range of functions, together with meals dealing with, manufacturing, and biomedical therapeutics.
The analysis was printed lately in Science Robotics.
Peristaltic pumps are broadly utilized in business. These easy machines use motors to compress a versatile tube, making a strain differential that forces liquid via the tube. All these pumps are particularly helpful in biomedical functions as a result of the fluid would not contact any element of the pump itself.
“Peristaltic pumps can ship liquids with a variety of viscosities, particle-liquid suspensions, or fluids akin to blood, that are difficult for different kinds of pumps,” mentioned first creator Siyi Xu, a former graduate pupil at SEAS and present postdoctoral fellow in Wooden’s lab.
Constructing off earlier analysis, Xu and the group designed electrically powered dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) to behave because the pump’s motor and rollers. These tender actuators have ultra-high energy density, are light-weight, and may run for a whole bunch of 1000’s of cycles.
The group designed an array of DEAs that coordinate with one another, compressing a millimeter-sized channel in a programmed sequence to supply strain waves.
The result’s a centimeter-sized pump sufficiently small to suit on board a small tender robotic and highly effective sufficient to actuate motion, with controllable strain, move fee, and move route.
“We additionally demonstrated that we might actively tune the output from steady move to droplets by various the enter voltages and the outlet resistance, in our case the diameter of the blunt needle,” mentioned Xu. “This functionality could enable the pump to be helpful not just for robotics but additionally for microfluidic functions.”
“The vast majority of tender robots comprise inflexible parts someplace alongside their drivetrain,” mentioned Wooden. “This subject began as an effort to swap out a kind of key items, the pump, with a tender various. However alongside the best way we realized that compact tender 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 beneath grant CMMI-1830291.
Video: https://youtu.be/knC9HJ6K-sU
