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Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/3

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    Liquid metal microdroplet-initiated ultra-fast polymerization of a stimuli-responsive hydrogel composite
    (Wiley-V C H Verlag Gmbh, 2023) Zhang, Jianhua; Liao, Jiahe; Liu, Zemin; Zhang, Rongjing; Department of Mechanical Engineering; Sitti, Metin; Department of Mechanical Engineering; College of Engineering; School of Medicine
    Recent advances in composite hydrogels achieve material enhancement or specialized stimuli-responsive functionalities by pairing with a functional filler. Liquid metals (LM) offer a unique combination of chemical, electrical, and mechanical properties that show great potential in hydrogel composites. Polymerization of hydrogels with LM microdroplets as initiators is a particularly interesting phenomenon that remains in its early stage of development. In this work, an LM-hydrogel composite is introduced, in which LM microdroplets dispersed inside the hydrogel matrix have dual functions as a polymerization initiator for a polyacrylic acid-poly vinyl alcohol (PAA/PVA) network and, once polymerized, as passive inclusion to influence its material and stimuli-responsive characteristics. It is demonstrated that LM microdroplets enable ultra-fast polymerization in approximate to 1 min, compared to several hours by conventional polymerization techniques. The results show several mechanical enhancements to the PAA/PVA hydrogels with LM-initiated polymerization. It is found that LM ratios strongly influence stimuli-responsive behaviors in the hydrogels, including swelling and ionic bending, where higher LM ratios are found to enhance ionic actuation performance. The dual roles of LM in this composite are analyzed using the experimental characterization results. These LM-hydrogel composites, which are biocompatible, open up new opportunities in future soft robotics and biomedical applications. A composite hydrogel embedded with liquid metal (LM) microdroplets is introduced, where the LM microdroplets have dual roles of initiating ultra-fast polymerization and passive inclusion. The physical effects of LM on polymerization and stimuli-responsive behaviors are analyzed, including swelling and ionic actuation due to osmotic pressure differences. Their benefits to the LM-hydrogel functionalities, such as robot locomotion, are demonstrated.
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    Hydrogel muscles powering reconfigurable micro-metastructures with wide-spectrum programmability
    (Nature Portfolio, 2023) Zhang, Mingchao; Pal, Aniket; Zheng, Zhiqiang; Gardi, Gaurav; Yildiz, Erdost; Department of Mechanical Engineering; Sitti, Metin; Department of Mechanical Engineering; College of Engineering; School of Medicine
    Stimuli-responsive geometric transformations endow metamaterials with dynamic properties and functionalities. However, using existing transformation mechanisms to program a single geometry to transform into diverse final configurations remains challenging, imposing crucial design restrictions on achieving versatile functionalities. Here, we present a programmable strategy for wide-spectrum reconfigurable micro-metastructures using linearly responsive transparent hydrogels as artificial muscles. Actuated by the hydrogel, the transformation of micro-metastructures arises from the collaborative buckling of their building blocks. Rationally designing the three-dimensional printing parameters and geometry features of the metastructures enables their locally isotropic or anisotropic deformation, allowing controllable wide-spectrum pattern transformation with programmable chirality and optical anisotropy. This reconfiguration mechanism can be applied to various materials with a wide range of mechanical properties. Our strategy enables a thermally reconfigurable printed metalattice with pixel-by-pixel mapping of different printing powers and angles for displaying or hiding complex information, providing opportunities for encryption, miniature robotics, photonics and phononics applications. It is difficult to program a single stimuli-responsive geometry to transform into diverse final configurations in a systematic manner. Here, linearly responsive transparent hydrogels are developed to create micro-metastructures with wide-spectrum thermal reconfigurability.