Title
Producing and Manipulating Functional Liquid Metal Droplets using Magnetic and Electrical Fields
Abstract
As an emerging multi-functional material, gallium based room temperature liquid metal attracts particular attentions in a variety of applications in recent years due to its extraordinary mobility and deformability. However, without reliable controllability, the liquid metal greatly reduces its potential applications in many fields. In this study, we proposed a new design of the functional liquid metal obtained by magnetic modification of pure liquid metal with copper-iron alloy nano-particles. The functional liquid metal droplet exhibits similar appearance, mobility, deformability and continuous electrowetting effect in alkaline solutions to those of the pure liquid metal droplet under external electrical field. Meanwhile, it enables to be controlled and manipulated by an external magnetic field precisely and quickly. The surface free energy generated during the wetting process exceeds energy barrier during the magnetic modification process, which allows the copper-iron alloy particles to suspend into the liquid metal and form the functional liquid metal. The mobility and deformability of the functional liquid metal droplet are verified by manipulation tasks in cross-linked channels and sloped channel when applying the integration of the electrical and magnetic fields. The remarkable features of the functional liquid metal represent extensive potentials toward the design of future intelligent soft robots.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/RCAR47638.2019.9043986
2019 IEEE International Conference on Real-time Computing and Robotics (RCAR)
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
magnetic modification process,energy barrier,surface free energy,alkaline solutions,electrowetting effect,mobility,copper-iron alloy nanoparticles,functional liquid metal droplets,deformability,electrical fields,magnetic fields,temperature 293.0 K to 298.0 K,Cu-Fe
Conference
978-1-7281-3727-8
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
1
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fangxia Li100.68
Shaolong Kuang204.06
Hao Yang314321.47
Shiwu Zhang48011.23
Xiangpeng Li59916.53