Liquid Metal Soft Machines: Principles and Applications

Description

This book discusses the core principles and practical applications of a brand new machine category: liquid-metal soft machines and motors. After a brief introduction on the conventional soft robot and its allied materials, it presents the new conceptual liquid-metal machine, which revolutionizes existing rigid robots, both large and small. It outlines the typical features of the soft liquid-metal materials and describes the various transformation capabilities, mergence of separate metal droplets, self-rotation and planar locomotion of liquid-metal objects under external or internal mechanism. Further, it introduces a series of unusual phenomena discovered while developing the shape changeable smart soft machine and interprets the related mechanisms regarding the effects of the shape, size, voltage, orientation and geometries of the external fields to control the liquid-metal transformers. Moreover, the book illustrates typical strategies to construct a group of different advanced functional liquid-metal soft machines, since such machines or robots are hard to fabricate using rigid-metal or conventional materials. With highly significant fundamental and practical findings, this book is intended for researchers interested in establishing a general method for making future smart soft machine and accompanying robots. Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii Introduction (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 1-12 Basic Properties of Liquid Metal and Soft Matter (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 13-35 Injectable Transformation of Liquid Metal (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 37-54 Electrically Induced Transformations of Liquid Metal Among Different Morphologies (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 55-89 Reversible Transformation of Liquid Metal Machine (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 91-108 Electromagnetic Field Induced Transformation of Liquid Metal (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 109-129 Self Fuelled Transformable Liquid Metal Machine (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 131-171 Self-Powered Tiny Liquid Metal Motors (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 173-197 Liquid Metal Transient State Machine (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 199-222 Directional Control of Self-fuelled Liquid Metal Machine (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 223-248 Environment Enabled Liquid Metal Machine (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 249-266 Nanoparticles Enabled Liquid Metal Motions (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 267-285 Substrate Enabled Liquid Metal Machine (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 287-309 Chemicals Enabled Liquid Metal Machine (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 311-328 Hybrid Liquid Metal Machine (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 329-358 Liquid Metal Wheeled 3D-Printed Vehicle (Jing Liu, Lei Sheng, Zhi-Zhu He)....Pages 359-372