摘要
High-performance yarn artificial muscles are highly desirable as miniature actuators,sensors,energy harvesters,and soft robotics.However,achieving a yarn artificial muscle that covers all the properties of excellent actuation performance,mechanical robustness,structural stability,and high scalability by a low-cost strategy is still a great challenge.Herein,a bio-inspired fasciated yarn structure is first reported for creating robust high-performance yarn artificial muscles.Unlike conventional strategies that leverage costly materials or complex processing,the developed yarn artificial muscles are constructed by hierarchically helical and sheath-core assembly design of cost-effective common fibers,such as viscose and polyester.The hierarchically helical sheath structure pushes the theoretical limit of the inserted twist in yarns and endows the yarn muscles with large stroke(5815°cm^(-1))and high work capacity(23.5 J kg^(-1)).Due to the rapid water transfer and efficient energy conversion of inter-sheath-core coupling,the as-prepared yarn muscles possess fast response,high rotation accelerated speed,and low recovery hysteresis.Moreover,the inactive core yarn serves as support for internal tethering and load-bearing,enabling these yarn muscles to maintain a self-stable structure,robust life cycle and mechanics.We show that the yarn muscle fabricated in this method is readily available and highly scalable for achieving high-dimensional actuation deformations,which considerably broadens the application scenarios of artificial muscles.
基金
National Natural Science Foundation of China(NSFC,Grant No.12272149,11802104)
partly supported by the National Key Research and Development Program(Grant No.2017YFB0309200).
作者简介
Nan Sheng is studying at the MOE Key Laboratory of Ecotextile,Jiangnan University,majoring in Textile Science and Engineering.Her research area is in the fiber-based artificial muscles and soft actuators;Yangyang Peng received her MEng.Degree in Materials and Chemical Engineering from Jiangnan University.She is now a PhD student at the MOE Key Laboratory of Eco-textile,Jiangnan University.Her current research interests include fiberbased artificial muscles and E-textiles;Fengxin Sun was educated in textile materials and received PhD from Donghua University.He once had research experience at Institute for Frontier Materials,Deakin University.He is currently an Associate Professor in MOE Key laboratory of Ecotextile,Jiangnan University.His research interests include multiscale structural mechanics of soft fibrous materials,soft actuators and smart textiles,especially the development of textile-structured smart materials and soft robotics,fxsun@jiangnan.edu.cn;Jinlian Hu was educated in textile materials and received PhD from Manchester University.She is a faculty in Department of Biomedical Engineering of CityU and leads a Laboratory of Wearable Materials for Healthcare.Professor Hu is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry,Hong Kong Institution of Textile and Apparel and the British Textile Institute.She is the founding chairman of the Hong Kong Health Science and Technology Park,the executive vice chairman of the Hong Kong Invention and Innovation Federation.jinliahu@cityu.edu.hk。
