Engineers have developed a new class of smart textiles that can shape-shift and turn a two-dimensional material into 3D structures.
The team from UNSW Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering and Tyree Foundation Institute of Health Engineering and led by Dr Thanh Nho Do, have produced a material which is constructed from tiny soft artificial ‘muscles’ – which are long silicon tubes filled with fluid which are manipulated to move via hydraulics.
Potential applications for the material include use as a compression garment, as a wearable assistive device for those needing help with movement, and even as shape-shifting soft robots.
Professor Nigel Lovell, Director, Tyree IHealthE, commented: “Soft robots utilising our smart textile can shape shift and be implemented as a lifting mechanism, such as when rescuing people from collapsed buildings or other hazardous environments, or as a soft tubular gripper – in our experiments we could lift objects around 346 times the material’s own weight.”
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