Nanostructured fibers can impersonate human muscles | Hacker News Reader

Nanostructured fibers can impersonate human muscles

ae.utexas.edu

74 pointsjdmark15 comments

It’s going to be extremely exciting when a group figures out artificial muscles that can be actuated electrically with high efficiency and speed.

I feel the same way.

The clumsy replication we currently use of cables held under torsion using servos would be replaced instantly.

The kinds of actuation we'd be able to produce would only be rivaled by nature.

Servos and cables are going to drastically outperform these artificial muscles, though.

Only high performance hydraulics exceeds that.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.aar3276

This is some really cool work in that direction. Very high voltages though as usual.

I've been wondering why we don't fabricate huge arrays or stacks of miniature versions of these. The voltage requirements should go down as the size decreases, right? Does some other aspect not scale well?

There are electrostatic MEMs devices so it would scale well with a flexible material and the dielectric inserted in some way. These smaller devices are lower voltage (90-100V versus 6-10kV in the above) and require the use of a converter. The current is virtually zero for both though.

These novel materials are fascinating, feels like modern alchemy. Even if 99% are academic vaporware.

These fibres don't seem to be actuated by electrical current, rather heat or water absorption. This makes them quite unlike muscle I would have thought.

I suspect the efficiency is low if they’re activated by heat. They give high “efficiency” number, but who knows what the denominator is. It’s paywalled.

I assume the vast majority of the neat material we have today came from a lab. Antiadhesive coating, velcro, even aluminum wasn't always possible at scale.

"Impersonate"

It's infantilism and common and alas in the original lead story. I came here to call it out, you did it for me.

Identity theft is not a joke, nanofiber! Millions of families suffer every year!

X-ray scattering techniques seem to be a bit of a fad in recent years within many fields due in part to good availability. To a SAXS or related expert, are such experiments really necessary for a paper in this field? Was this the most efficient/straightforward to prove the crystallinity or strain? Or is it just the coolest?

They’re looking at layers in a semicrystalline solid, so I actually do think that’s appropriate.

Every time I read a story like this my hope that we can invent Myomer increases.

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