elastomer tagged posts

A Butterfly-Inspired Design to Create Crumple-Recoverable Electronics

A butterfly-inspired design to create crumple-recoverable electronics
Credit: Roh et al, Nature Electronics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41928-023-01089-6

Over the past decades, electronics engineers have created devices of various shapes and with increasingly sophisticated designs. This includes electronics that can be folded onto themselves, such as foldable phones, along with various other compressible devices.

Researchers at Ajou University and other institutes in South Korea recently introduced a new design for developing crumple-recoverable electronics, or in other words, electronics that can recover their original shape after being crumpled or compressed onto themselves to reduce their size...

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Transforming Flat Elastomers into 3D Shapes

An initially flat thin circular sheet of elastomer with embedded electrodes morphs into a saddle shape.
Credit: Image courtesy of the Clarke Lab/Harvard SEAS

Researchers have developed a method to change the shape of a flat sheet of elastomer, using actuation that is fast, reversible, controllable by an applied voltage, and reconfigurable to different shapes.

Mechanical systems, such as engines and motors, rely on 2 principal types of motions of stiff components: linear motion, which involves an object moving from one point to another in a straight line; and rotational motion, which involves an object rotating on an axis. Nature has developed far more sophisticated forms of movement – or actuation – that can perform complex functions more directly and with soft components...

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